Featured Research

Students whose fathers engage with their education are more successful

27 June 2018

This article was originally published in July 2017.

Life Course Centre researchers Dr Jenny Povey and Alice Campbell featured in an article in The Courier-Mail and on Channel 7’s evening news bulletin on 10 July, 2017, talking about their research into parents’ interest in their child’s education, and how it affects educational outcomes.

In their research Povey and Campbell explore the role of gender in relationships between parents’ interest in their child’s learning and education, and children’s educational outcomes across the life course, using two waves of data from the study ‘Growing Up in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children’.

Their research finds that students whose fathers engaged with their children’s education were more successful. By being engaged, that can be as simple as fathers asking how the school day went, and chatting to their child’s teacher.

A father who shows a strong interest in his child doubles the chance of that child gaining tertiary qualifications.

The Courier-Mail article, ‘University of Queensland Researchers find students whose fathers engage with their education are more successful’, (which may be behind a paywall) is here.