Is your child learning at home? What impact is lockdown-learning having on family life? We’re all guessing what’s going on in 8 million homes during lockdowns – but we don’t actually know!
So, we are asking YOU!
How does it work?
Easy! Just download the Parent Ping app from your app provider.
Each day your phone will PING! and send a few simple questions for you to answer. You can decide how many of your children you’d like to answer questions about, and we aim to make the whole thing as easy and simple as possible.
What do I get in return?
As well as the warm fuzzy feeling of being involved in an important research project, once you have answered you get to see other parents’ answers. Easy graphs show you how ‘normal’ your answers are! You are also rewarded with badges, points and a daily read about some aspect of parenting.
As well as all this we are giving away PRIZES! Every day you answer on the app, we enter a token into our national prize draw. Each week we will give away 5 Chromebooks to 5 lucky Pingers.
AND if your school is also participating in the research project, for everyday you answer we will enter a token into your school’s prize draw to win a £30 Amazon voucher each week.
You can find the full competition Ts&Cs here.
Why do you want to know what parents think?
Only you know what is happening at home when schools are closed. But other people – schools, policymakers – need to understand what happened and what might be done to support children when they return to school.
A charity called the Education Endowment Foundation is really worried that parents’ opinions are not being sought, so they have asked Parent Ping to ask you what is happening. The data that Parent Ping collect for the Education Endowment Foundation will be part of a big project looking at how learning is happening during the national lockdown
My school said I should do this - do they see my answers?!
No, your school will never see what you answer. Only if at least 60 parents in your school answer each day do they get a report about what all the parents in the school have said. They are really interested to hear your opinions, and might make changes based on what they learn.
What type of thing will you be asking?
For the study, we would like to know things like…
🔹 What challenges have you faced this week home-schooling during lockdown
🔹 Thinking about home learning yesterday, how long did your child work for in total?
But because Parent Ping asks questions every day, and because parenting isn’t just about education, we may also ask questions like…
🔹 Which chores cause the most rows in your household?
🔹 How much money does the tooth fairy pay for a tooth?
(but we won’t be reporting these questions back to schools, just the ones about home-learning!)
Who can participate?
Any parent can join in with Parent Ping, however it will be most relevant to parents of children in education, from nursery to university, but that doesn’t mean you can’t join in if you are interested… you just might not be able to answer all of the questions (but there will always be a ‘not applicable’ option).
We know that families and parents come in all shapes and sizes and hold no preconceptions about that. If you have parental responsibility for at least one child then this app is for you!
To be eligible for the school prize draw, your school needs to tell us they want to be involved (you could share this information with them). The school needs to be a mainstream primary, infant or junior school operating in the state sector in England.
What do you do with my data?
We use the answers from each of the surveys to share results back to you, on a weekly blog (so you can see analysis of results), and with organisations who are trying to find out what parents think.
BUT – and this is really important – all data is centrally held by us. We don’t share individual results or personal data with third-party companies. We take privacy seriously and do our utmost to protect confidentiality, which is why we ask you to give your child a nickname (not their real name), and only ask for the minimum amount of information on sign-up that we need to support the research. We have a strict privacy policy and you can request that we delete your personal data at any time.
I’m interested! What’s the next step?
Easy, get the app and start pinging!