Supporting parents to support children. A UK Randomised Controlled Trial testing a text-message intervention to cultivate the home learning environment [Pre-Registration].

A stimulating and supportive home learning environment helps children to be cognitively and emotionally ready to learn by age 5. Despite the increased availability of parenting information, the attainment gap between rich and poor continues to widen in many developed nations. Tips by Text is a 12-month text-message programme developed in the US, and designed to integrate developmental activities into everyday tasks that parents and children do together. The messages aim to enhance language, literacy, numeracy, and socioemotional skills in 4-year-olds. The programme was adapted and tested in a large-scale randomised controlled trial involving 109 schools in England from 2019 to 2021 (n=3,600). Post-intervention data collection was impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic, resulting in approximately 70% random attrition on the primary outcome measure and a final analytical sample of n=753. This sample is comparable to the US-based sample in which the efficacy of Tips by Text was originally assessed, and so we proceed with analysis. In this study, we conduct secondary data analysis to examine the effectiveness of the programme on the sample that could be obtained. We explore whether students facing various challenges, including economic and neighbourhood disadvantage, English as an additional language, special educational needs, and multiple simultaneous challenges, were differentially impacted by the programme.