The subject of parents is often neglected by training colleges. Apart from the odd lecture on family relationships, it may not be tackled at all, even though conditions of employment for school teachers now include communicating and consulting with parents and taking part in meetings with parents and pupils.
In addition schools are now legally bound to communicate more with parents about programmes of work and about the children’s progress, and the Office for Standards in Education must now include in inspection reports an assessment of the school’s links with parents.
Not that all schools are meetings these requirements. The breaking down of the traditional parentteacher relationship of professional expert and unlearned lay person is slow in happening. A recent Consumer’s Association survey found, for example, that four out of five in a random sample of 61 secondary schools failed to provide all the information required under the new rules on publishing prospectuses).
Even when the information is ostensibly being supplied, it may not be in a form which gets the message across. John Bastiani, director of the Royal Society of Arts “Parents in a Learning Society” project, recounts how one parent reacted to a teacher’s painstaking explanation of his son’s standard assessment task scores with the comment: “But what I want to know is, is it a bike or a bollocking?” - an understandable reaction, and one that illustrates that need for careful thinking about how information is presented.
Schools’ attitudes to parents vary considerably. Ruth Merttens, director of Impact, a project dedicated to developing the connections between learning at home and learning at school, has visited schools that are “totally welcoming places where parents are seen as part of the educational process” and others where the overriding philosophy is that “teachers should be protected from parents” and where expressions of curiosity and interest from parents were met with suspicion.
However, many primary schools in particular have developed successful strategies for informing, involving and consulting parents. They are demonstrating what researchers have repeatedly shown, that parents can be as effective at educating their children as teachers.
Many primary schools now have schemes which involve parents reading with children, at home or through shared reading clubs in school. Teacherparent workshops on subjects such as maths, reading and computers have proved very effective. Projects such as Impact and Pact, which produce home-school maths and reading programmes, have also challenged the traditional view of parents as being separate from schools.
Teacher Neelam Batra says in a recent edition of Parents in a Learning Society that the shared reading club which she runs at Lowfield Primary School in Sheffield “increases parents’ awareness of the variety of activities that can be done at home to help their children read and write and gives them an opportunity to discuss how their child’s reading can be progressed.”
At Rush Common School in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, which has a homeschool association for every class, parents help in a huge variety of ways, many of them to do with the curriculum.
As part of a year 6 Second World War project, parents and grandparents came in to give first-hand accounts. Parents have organised a treasure hunt to enhance a project on mapping and initiated teacherparent workshops on subjects such as maths, reading and computers. Headmaster John Fisher says: “You suddenly find yourself tapping into a seam of expertise you didn’t know you had.”
Such schools point out that parents who know what is going on in schools are able to offer constructive support based on knowledge of the situation in which the school finds itself. For many primary schools these words are axiomatic. But that is not the case with many secondary schools which, even when the will is there, often find it very difficult to involve parents. Research by the Policy Studies Institute found that at 20 comprehensive schools studied, one in five parents had not visited the school during the year.
Other research shows that parental interest and support at this stage is a crucial factor in a young person’s progress. The argument that parents are simply not interested does not wash. As the experience of imaginative, outgoing schools has demonstrated, parents want to be involved in their children’s school, but may lack the confidence and know-how to do it.
With schemes such as “parent advocacy”, in which parents more familiar with the school befriend new parents, however, these barriers can be overcome. Some primary schools are now working with secondary schools on schemes to assist the transition from one school to the other and to sustain parents’ involvement. Workshops, which put parents in touch with how the school is tackling specific areas of the curriculum, can prove useful and popular.
The authors of The Homework File, published by Strathclyde University Quality in Education Centre last month, declared: “Schools which successfully involve large numbers of parents do so because they are able to tap into what parents want or need, because they consult and listen to parents, because they work through, and with, the pupils wherever possible and because they try to do something about the physical and psychological obstacles that prevent parents from visiting the schools.”
