Supporting Parents to Support Children: A U.K. Randomized Controlled Trial Testing a Text Message Intervention to...

A stimulating and supportive home learning environment helps children to be cognitively and emotionally ready to learn by age 5. Despite the growing availability of parenting resources, the attainment gap between affluent and disadvantaged families continues to widen across many developed nations. Tips by Text is a 12-month text message program originally developed in the United States to help parents integrate developmental activities into daily routines with their children. Designed for 4- to 5-year-olds, the messages aim to support language, literacy, numeracy, and socioemotional skills. We adapted and tested the Tips by Text program in a large-scale randomized controlled trial involving 109 schools in England from 2019 to 2021 (n = 3,649). Due to COVID-19, postintervention data collection faced approximately 70% attrition on the primary outcome measure, resulting in a final analytical sample of n = 753. Despite this, the retained sample was comparable to the original U.S. study, allowing us to proceed with analysis. In this study, we replicate the primary impact analysis conducted by the original randomized controlled trial evaluators and extend it to examine whether the intervention had differential effects on children facing various challenges, including socioeconomic disadvantage, language barriers, special educational needs, or multiple overlapping risk factors. Our analysis found no significant improvements in reading-related skills or socioemotional outcomes nor any meaningful differences in response to the program based on these subgroups. The high level of attrition limited the study's power to detect effects, underscoring the need for further evaluation, which is currently underway.