> You can do a lot just by engaging those parents

But what if those parents don't want to be engaged with. A lot of children who would be "left behind" in the old school would have been from a worse social-economic background which would mean the parents just won't have time for the school events. Or they might just not care about the kids.

Very few parents are sociopaths - so let's go with 99.9% of parents care about their children and their future - but most of us don't have credible people standing in front of us geeing is on to take the right actions at the right time

Have "parent trainers" for a school and i expect a massive increase in engagement - and pupil outcomes.

This of course comes at a cost.

And where parents are working 3 jobs to get buy, then yes, there is another extra cost to society - which is to ask why have we arranged society so some people are in that situation ? cf tax regieme, welfare state etc etc

> Have "parent trainers" for a school and i expect a massive increase in engagement - and pupil outcomes.

I don't. For three reasons:

(1) the needed training is probably deep, not shallow, and needs years of lead time.

(2) most parents aren't sociopaths, sure, but that doesn't mean they accept an offered external authority as more knowledgeable than themselves on rearing their children, even if they actually were.

(3) #1 is only a “probably” because it's not entirely clear what the needed training is; we know parental wealth and educational attainment makes a big difference, but we don't know on a more detailed level why, and there are conflicting explanations. Having trainers may not help much of we don't know what it is that they should be training.

What about the parents who value education and would love to be engaged more, but need to work three jobs to survive?