Does families-schools cooperation improve school-aged children's social emotional behaviour (SEB) and academic achievement? Systematic Review

To identify promising family-school interventions that have a positive effect on children’s social emotional behaviour and children’s academic performance, this paper presents the results of a systematic review of international studies. A search of 7 electronic databases supplemented by other sources yielded 9181 studies. Only 43 met the pre-defined inclusion and exclusion criteria. A range of intervention programmes were tested and almost all claimed to be effective, but only Families and Schools Together (FAST) in general was found to have the best evidence of effectiveness. However, because high attrition in most studies and small sample in some, the evidence is not strong enough to be conclusive. Evidence for the other programmes was even weaker. Furthermore, future research should prioritize rigorous design improvements and enhanced participant retention to generate more conclusive evidence. These findings suggest that research in this field is still rather immature, replicable robust studies are needed to advance the field.