Parents can play an important role in their children’s educational choices. When valuable information about school choices can be made available to families, who can and should be targeted is an important policy question. Pupils can be easier to reach since they are in school, but they may not bring home all of the information that their parents could use to ultimately make decisions.

In this paper, we compare parents who were directly targeted with school-choice information with those who received information only indirectly through their children’s exposure at school. This was done through delivering informational booklets and a video about the secondary school selection process directly to parents in a randomly selected 300 out of 600 schools in which students received this information. A survey of parents about their knowledge and role in the application process provides outcome data.

We see that directly targeting parents increased how much parents know about their child’s school selection, and it increased their reported role – whether they helped, had the final vote, and were the sole decision makers.

For more information on the program, see summary from partner IPA and funder JPAL.

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