E N G A G E M E N T O R I N V O LV E M E N T ?
Engagement or Involvement?
Do the policies of the Coalition Government signal a change in the relationship between school and home? How can schools ensure that their administration systems enhance rather than hinder relationships with parents?
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Engag e m e nt or involv e m e nt ?
Definitions: Parental Engagement: enabling parents to support and/or encourage their children’s education at home. Parental Involvement: parents becoming actively involved in school processes such as governance, fundraising or learning support.
The Political Background The importance of the role of parents within the English education system can be easily traced as a growing and central aspect of government policy since 1979, a movement that recognised that in order to develop civic responsibility in what was beginning to be called ‘stakeholder Britain’, the populace had to be given a more active voice in the way their lives were conducted. The Conservative Governments of Thatcher and Major started the ball rolling with their focus on greater choice for parents, greater accountability for schools and increased responsibility for parents – more strictly within the realms of Parental Involvement, and then within the Labour administrations of Blair and Brown, we saw an increasing amount of investment, research and legislation to support the development of Parental Engagement. Traditionally, and perhaps perversely, the relationship between school and home has never been an easy one, with over one-third of parents saying that they feel uneasy about contacting their child’s secondary school, and teachers reporting that they face increased levels of anxiety when conducting parent consultation meetings.
hampered by the mixed messages of the very legislation that sought to improve it. At a time when the teaching profession was at its most demoralised, undergoing some of the most radical changes to its autonomy that it had ever faced, and the challenge to their professionalism that this brought, legislation cast parents in the role of consumers who would monitor the performance of schools and individual teachers. Expectations on parents were also increased and made more overt through the increase in the number of parents on governing bodies and the introduction of the Home/ School Agreement, a document that all parents were expected to sign to form a ‘contract’ of expectation between school and home. All of this helped to develop an uneasy relationship, typified by what Crozier (2000) calls ‘mutual surveillance’. Breaking this cycle of mutual distrust is a monumental but vital task and certainly there can be little doubt that it was in the previous Government’s thinking that the less invasive Parental Engagement route was the logical starting place from which to build the confidence of both parties. However, even the Labour Government introduced measures that enhanced Parental Involvement, giving them powers to speed the process of reform by increasing the number of parent governors in the Foundation School programme and having the right to request an Ofsted inspection for example. To date, the Coalition Government has had little to say on Parental Engagement but the cornerstone of Mr Gove’s education policy, Free Schools, giving parents and other interested parties the right to establish and run their own schools, and a return to the mantra of ‘greater choice’,
is an obvious indication of the importance they place on Parental Involvement. In line with the Academies programme (Free Schools automatically become academies) parents, as the major sponsor group, would be able to appoint the majority of the 13 school governors in their Free School.
The Conservative Governments of Thatcher and Major started the ball rolling with their focus on greater choice for parents [and] greater accountability for schools The Societal Background Another important and growing influence on Parental Involvement is the shift in modern living that is taking place in all aspects of our lives. This can be seen through the effect of technology, improving business practice, and the focus on client satisfaction on our everyday lives, all of which shape parental expectations of school as service provider. Technology has brought an immediacy to our ability to access information and our capacity to communicate with others; with email, texting, mobile phone technology and the internet becoming an active part of our daily lives. It gives us greater access to information and opinion, making us less reliant on the views and opinions of ‘experts’ and
This relationship has been further
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Schools should have the most accurate data on home-based internet access for each of their pupils professionals. It gives us greater ease, immediacy and frequency in our communication with others and greater ownership and self-determination in the way we organise our lives. At the turn of the Millennium, we marvelled at the novelty and wonders of the telephone line internet access where photos sent from the other side of the world could be downloaded within minutes in the comfort of our own homes – as long as no one else wanted to make a phone call! Now these operations are conducted on our mobile telephones, instantaneously as we walk down the street. Our pupils have never known life without the internet. There can be no doubt that such a revolution has a huge impact on Society and the way we view and live our lives and our relationships. Our public service institutions now need to make adjustments to allow for these new expectations but sadly these institutions change at a slower pace than technology. How then do you prepare your school for this brave new world? Adjusting to change To start with, it is no longer feasible to live by the mantra of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”; as successive Governments have put in motion a band-wagon that will not slow down. Those areas of business that have been traditionally
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more responsive to the needs of their customers and clients, and have successfully risen to the challenges of meeting those needs, have shaped the agenda for the wider service providers, and schools in particular, where attitudes and institutional structures have been slower to change. Consultation It has never been easier to consult with individuals. No matter how disparate a group of people might seem, when they are part of a school’s parent cohort they become part of the same commonality. Schools should have the most accurate data on homebased internet access for each of their pupils. Current estimates put access at over 80% with even greater numbers of parents having internet access through either work or mobile phone technology. All learning platforms have the capacity to create special interest groups for parent users, enabling specific groups of parents to be contacted on any subject and their opinions sought via email message or online survey. Many parents now use mobile phones for their contact when out of the home, some are finding it more cost effective to remove their landline and use their mobile phones exclusively.
Although not ideal for all forms of communication, email in particular does have the capacity to encourage rapid, informal exchanges. Many parents who have previously been labelled as ‘hard to reach’ feeling insecure in the secondary school environment or when using the phone, feel more at ease communicating through email. In some respects, ‘hard to reach’, was our euphemism for ‘hard to bring into school’, the internet enables us to reach out in the true sense of the word. Schools are also reporting that more and more fathers are becoming actively engaged in their children’s education through the opportunities presented by the use of technology. This can be most graphically demonstrated in the use of Online Reporting to parents, where parents can be kept up to date on such issues as achievement, progress, attendance, punctuality and behaviour on an hour to hour basis where appropriate. Research shows that fathers enjoy engaging with technology and that fathers have the greatest influence on their children’s attainment. •
To what extent does your school use the internet or mobile phone technology to
Engag e m e nt or involv e m e nt ?
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contact parents? What systems do you have in place to ensure that you have up-to-date contact information for each parent? How do you canvass the views of your parent body and consult them? What proportion of your parent body currently plays an active role in the school’s decision-making process?
Keeping Informed One of the most frequent concerns I hear expressed about the use of internet and mobile technology for school-parent, parent-school communication, is that the teachers’ time will be monopolised by well-meaning parents with nothing better to do. This statement is of course true, unless you create structures and procedures within your school that make it an impossibility. Email should not be the sole means of communication and the school needs to develop a communications policy that outlines what the most appropriate form of communication is to enable the most efficient use of everyone’s time. Does your school: • have a policy on streamlining methods of communication with parents to move away from paper towards digital? • have targets for the progressive reduction of paper use for school-home communication? • have a policy about how frequently staff should check and respond to their emails? • have a policy about how rapidly parental enquiries should be responded to? • have details about how to contact staff, and how best to contact them, on the school website?
Enabling change It goes without saying that ‘actions speak louder than words’. So no matter what changes a school proposes to make to improve their relationship with parents it is how they treat the parents that really matters. The best laid plans can be scuppered by one receptionist off-message. By and large, we find that middle-class parents are more comfortable in contacting and interacting with their children’s school than working-class parents.
The school environment and the educational process must be something which every parent feels they understand •
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I n the same way that your school will identify and monitor groups of pupils who may underperform, such as FSM or pupils from different ethnic groups, do you know if there are any groups of parents who are not engaging with the school, and what is being done to rectify the situation? Does your school have a parental engagement/ involvement policy that gives specific targets and measurable outcomes? Do you have training programmes for the admin team? Has your school undertaken staff training on Parental Engagement and/or Parental Involvement? How do you inform
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parents about the range of possibilities you are going to place before them in a decision-making process? How do you encourage parents to submit their ideas for school improvement?
Making a Fairer Society We know that year-on-year pupil achievement and attainment improves. We also know that the attainment gap between the high achievers and the disadvantaged continues to grow. Nationally, the institution of education remains middle class. If every pupil is to be able to achieve her or his potential, our main focus within schools should be the removal of the barriers that hinder that outcome. The school environment and the educational process must be something which every parent feels they understand and can be confident enough to discuss. To date this is something that we in education have been reluctant or slow to deliver. Successive Governments have known that if Britain is to remain competitive within international markets, the standard of education has to improve for all. Parents have proven themselves to be the best advocates for their children, and by empowering parents to influence the way schools are run by becoming governors, and by monitoring and comparing the relative success of local schools, we are increasing the democratisation of education, making it accessible to all. Parental Involvement is only going to increase. Change is inevitable, and whilst schools are slow to respond to that change, many of our pupils pay the price in underachievement. Schools need to urgently examine their approach to Parental Involvement.
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