You may have heard the story of the Indian slum children who taught themselves how to use computers when someone embedded a computer in his Delhi office wall for them. It proved so successful that all around the world the same experiment was repeated and each time, children taught themselves complex tasks easily – with little supervision.

But, and here is an even more interesting fact.

The enduring influence of the effect of parent engagement on the successful education of their children comes over loud and clear in a new book based on more than ten years of research on children from the age of three.

A child’s background emerges as roughly twice as important as the pre-school or primary school they attend in how they do at school and how they develop socially