Today Public First and the Parent Voice Project publish How Schools Work for Every Child, the second report in a three-part series exploring how parents experience the education system in England.

Founded by Fiona Forbes, the project aims to address a long-standing gap in national education debates: while teachers, unions and policymakers are regularly consulted, parents – who see the system up close every day – are rarely heard at scale. The Parent Voice Project seeks to fill that gap by providing balanced, robust insight that is constructive for schools and useful for policymakers. 

This second report draws on the biggest ever representative survey of parents in the education system, alongside focus groups with parents across England. Together, the findings show that while parents continue to back schools and teachers overall, their experiences are far from uniform – and confidence in the system varies sharply depending on their child’s needs, where they live, and the kind of support they feel schools are able to provide.

One of the clearest findings concerns children with SEND who do not have an Education, Health and Care Plan. Parents of these children are the least satisfied group in the school system. Just 57 per cent rate the quality of education at their child’s school as high or very high, compared with 68 per cent of parents of children with SEND and an EHCP, and 71 per cent of parents of children without SEND. In focus groups, parents consistently linked confidence not simply to formal diagnosis or categorisation, but to whether support felt structured, visible and reliably delivered in practice.

As one parent told researchers:

“There’s no thought put in [to supporting SEND] until something goes wrong. So it feels like you’re constantly saying this isn’t right, this isn’t right, rather than someone sitting down and planning it… It’s a battle the whole time.” – Mother from Weston-super-Mare in Social Grade B with children aged 15 and 17, one with SEND and no EHCP

Parents’ views on inclusion are also more nuanced than is sometimes assumed. Support for mainstream inclusion is real, but conditional. Half of parents say it is important for children with SEND to be educated in mainstream schools, yet only 52 per cent believe teachers are currently well equipped to support them. Among parents of children with SEND but no EHCP, that falls to just 38 per cent.

The research also highlights the extent to which mental health support shapes how parents judge schools overall. Among parents who say mental health support at their child’s school is very good, 93 per cent also say the school provides a high-quality education overall. Among those who rate it very poorly, that falls to 17 per cent. Parents’ experiences here are also highly unequal: 71 per cent of the most affluent parents rate mental health provision highly, compared with 51 per cent of the poorest, while 88 per cent of parents choosing independent education say the same, compared with 55 per cent in state comprehensives.

Other findings include:

• Attendance is not a major concern for most parents, and missing school is widely normalised across groups.

• Parents are divided on attendance enforcement, with substantial regional variation.

• Parents’ experiences of mental health support vary sharply by income, school type and geography.

• Parents’ perceptions of mental health provision are closely linked to how they judge school quality overall.

This report is the second in a series running across the 2025–26 academic year. A final report will explore how parents engage with schools, before recommendations are published at the end of the project.

Read the full report here.

Polling tables are available here.