Family !mpact

What is Family !mpact?

Family !mpact is a unique, online tool, designed by The Innovation Unit and Cognisco to capture and report, in real time, the views of parents/carers of school children.

The tool incorporates scenarios reflecting the five aims of Every Child Matters (be healthy, stay safe, enjoy and achieve, make a positive contribution and achieve economic well being).

Parents indicate whether they think the suggestions or actions in the statements in the scenarios are correct or not. A unique aspect of Family !mpact is that parents/carers are also asked to rate their level of confidence in the answer they have given.

This tool has been developed as part of The Innovation Unit's scaling up of the innovative field trial activity which has developed as part of our Next Practice in Education Programme around parental/carer engagement in schools across England. Several hundred parents, across multiple schools, were involved in piloting the tool and their feedback has been incorporated into the final design.

All parents want to help their children develop, but research shows that many are not sure how best to do this. This tool has been designed to help parents get more information about how they can help their children's development and learning at school. It also gives schools hard data as to where to invest their resources in support of parents. This is a must for any SEF!

The accurate insights generated around existing practices are invaluable for both instant action and forward planning by schools.

Further Information

Download the Family !mpact booklet which gives an overview of product features and includes ideas on how we anticipate schools might utilise the results generated from the use of the Family !mpact tool.  

Try a demonstration version of the Family !mpact tool 

The Innovation Unit hope that by trying a selection of five questions and viewing a sample of available reports that you will immediately see the potential for measuring the impact your school is able to make on all of your families.

Try the demonstration here.

(Please note you will be directed to an external website hosted by Cognisco). 

Next Steps

We anticipate that the tool will be available for general use in secondary schools from September 2008. We plan to have a tool ready for use in primary schools from January 2009.

If you would like to find out more about how this tool would suit the needs of your school then please e-mail me, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it , and I will arrange a time for us to talk.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Deryn Harvey - Director