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Research Topic: Numeracy and Literacy
Parental Involvement in raising the Achievement of Primary School Pupils: why bother? (Updated)
Edwards, Anne and Warin, Jo
Oxford Review of Education, (1999), Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. 325-341.
What is the real role of parental involvement?
Parents' involvement in their children's education is a consistent feature of primary school practice. All schools aim to involve parents, but the research suggests that schools are not always clear exactly why. Early attempts at parental involvement included structured reading improvement schemes and maths programmes that aimed to induct parents into the aims of the school. A more recent focus of parental involvement has been to address the differences between home and school. Both these approaches focus on the aims of the school and tend to regard parents as unwilling or unable educators. There has also been a tendency to overlook the views of the parents and the roles they want to play in their children's education. This study uses evidence from surveys and case studies to conclude that primary schools are currently being obliged to use parents to help deliver an over-loaded curriculum. The authors also point to the lack of recognition of the real role of parents as the child's earliest teachers and as the builders of learning identities on which all learning is based. Further, they suggest that parents are being expected to perform skilled pedagogical tasks for which they are inadequately prepared.
Keywords
UK; United Kingdom; England; literacy; numeracy; parents; pupils; classroom teachers; primary schools; school improvement; homework; home-school links; teacher attitudes; parent school relationship; self-esteem; parental involvement
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The Contents of the Study
What did the researchers aim to do?(click on page 3)
How was the study designed?(click on page 4)
What did the research find out?(click on page 5)
Is "getting parents in"to school enough?(click on page 6)
What were parents asked to do with their children?(click on page 7)
Conclusions(click on page 8)
Implications(click on page 9)
Where can I find out more?(click on page 10)
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The aims of this study
The primary schools in this study invested considerable time and effort in securing parental involvement in their children's learning. The authors set out to discover exactly what reasons were offered by schools for the time they had invested in parental involvement. What did the schools think was the role and value of parental involvement?
The authors review a range of research on parental involvement and support Vincent and Tomlinson's conclusion that the research into parental involvement is thin and "under-analysed and under-theorised". While policy-makers, Ofsted and other influential education agents all promote parental involvement in schools as a "good thing" there is little evidence in the literature of the effectiveness of different forms of parental involvement. They could find no analyses which addressed how parental involvement could help improve children's performance as learners, although there were what they called 'wish lists' or generalities stressing the benefits of parental involvement. The authors state:
‘What appears to be missing from analyses so far is just how parental involvement may be justified in terms of currently established understandings of how children learn. Without such a rationale strategies for parental involvement appear at worst to be strategies for asserting school values over those of parents and at best concerted efforts at whistling in the dark. If it is the latter, why do schools bother?’
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How was the study designed?
The research reported in this paper was part of an evaluation of a four-year study that aimed to improve literacy and numeracy performance through parental involvement in 70 schools in one LEA (primaries with 6 secondary and some special schools). This study looked primarily at questionnaire results of a postal survey of 60 schools participating in the project. The researchers also drew on information from previous surveys and from case studies of participating schools compiled using interviews, field notes and documentary analyses between 1992 and 1997.
The questionnaires asked teachers what their rationales were for parental involvement. The answers were sorted into a number of categories based on the meaning of the responses.
- Supporting pupil learning at home
- Communicating to parents about school activity
- Parents know their children better than we do
- Showing children home and school are linked
- Developing self esteem
- Parents become better educated
- Parents can work as volunteers in school
- Linking the school and community
- Provide a support network for parents
- Parents become aware of the demands on the teacher
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What did the research find out?
From their analysis of the evidence, the authors reported that:
- the schools' reasons for parental involvement were not well elaborated;
- the uptake of parental involvement was not clear and schools did not measure uptake carefully. The authors suggest that this might have been due to poor uptake in some schools;
- teachers expressed a number of reasons for involving parents but the most dominant of these was for parents to act as agents of the school in teaching their children elements of the school curriculum;
- primary schools were overwhelmingly concerned to "get parents in" but did not measure the effectiveness of participation in terms of pupil achievement;
- the self-esteem mentioned by teachers in responses to questionnaires tended not to take account of the crucial role of parents and home in developing their children's self concept - particularly in relation to their cultural and community context; and
- in planning tasks for parents schools concentrated too much on very skilled tasks which really needed specialist teaching knowledge.
The answers to the questionnaire were sorted into a number of categories based on the meaning of the responses. These responses were grouped into four main classes of rationale:
-parent as agent of the school (45%)
-to raise the self-esteem of parents as educators and of children (21%)
-parents have a special role with their children (11%)
-the school will become more embedded in the community (9%)
This suggested to the authors that teachers' rationales for the investment of time and energy in parental involvement were principally to enlist them as agents of the school and to educate them. In their words, "....these hard pressed primary school teachers, working with an over-loaded curriculum....were trying to turn parents into teachers who could provide additional pedagogic assistance." Interview data cited in the report supported this analysis.
“Because we have such large classes you can't do all the things you want to do with the children. I want them to hear their children read every night. I want the children to do more than I have time for...... "
“The main aim is that children will be able to have more individual help. We hope that the children will be pushed further along.”
The authors suggest that this does not seem to recognise and build upon the unique relationship of parent and child or to use the parent's knowledge of their child. They call this "a form of colonisation, rather than collaboration".
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Is "getting parents in" to school enough?
The issue of "getting parents in" to school was "an overriding concern" for most schools. The study reports that book loan schemes were a popular feature of primary schooling. For instance, in 1995 in 35 schools 1420 children borrowed materials for home use. The schemes were deemed a success simply because they "got parents in" to school. Success was measured on the basis of the number of parents who collected book bags and the number of loans made. No evidence about improvement of reading performance was available. Most schools did not gather assessment data that measured the impact of these schemes on their pupils' reading performance.
The figures for parental attendance at school were confusing because they were presented in such a way that researchers could not estimate how many parents had been involved. The authors suggest that "getting the parents in" was an over-riding concern for most of the schools. They recognise that this not easily achieved - hence, they suggest "most schools understandably camouflaged their lack of success."
Book loans and workshops represented a considerable investment of teacher and parent time. The study findings suggest that these initiatives were more geared towards exporting school materials, aims and values, rather than trying to understand, build on and work with parents' interest in and knowledge of their children's education.
The authors suggest that the questionnaire responses indicated an incomplete understanding of the role of self esteem in children's identity construction. They cite research evidence which indicated that the ways in which parents help their children to construct their identities were more powerful than the messages sent home by schools. Schools need to understand the parents' and children's views of where they stand in the world of education because this feeds into the children's self-concept. For this reason, the authors suggest, the schools with good uptake of parental provision were those who understood that some parents had bad, or no, experiences of schooling and adapted their provision accordingly - although they do not state how this was done. In some cases poor parental participation in workshops may have been related to unease about being taught "teacherly" ways of working with their children.
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What were parents asked to do with their children?
The study suggests that some of the materials and tasks sent home to parents could have been developed to be more useful. The parents were asked to undertake highly skilled activities such as doing number games or supporting children reading. These are tasks requiring specialised subject knowledge and schools did not seem sufficiently aware of this. (Perhaps this is not surprising, given how much teachers have to internalise and routinise their professional knowledge to put it to use in busy classrooms.)
The authors describe the types of responsive and informed interaction demanded by these activities as one of the most difficult aspects of inducting young learners into the curriculum. In some cases these tasks were chosen because the teachers felt that they had too much to do and parents could provide additional practice at school tasks and could be trained to do these tasks. This could mean that those children whose parents already had high level skills or access to the subject knowledge benefited more than children whose parents did not. Those schools where support was most needed because of the low 'base level start' were often the most frustrated in getting parents involved. It was also usually these schools where parents' attendance at training workshops was lowest.
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Conclusions
The authors conclude that the main emphasis in the schools' rationales for parental involvement was on breaking down barriers between home and school to improve the one-way flow of information and materials which carried school values into pupils' homes. They also report that some schools felt that breaking down the barriers between home and school helped with discipline. They believed that parental involvement showed the children that school and parents were on the 'same side' so they did not try and play off school against home.
Transmitting school values to parents, according to the authors, ignored the parents' own identities and communities and did not take account of the ways in which self concepts are formed, personal identities constructed and selves situated in their social worlds.
In primary schools, they concluded that teachers were looking towards parents to help them to deliver aspects of the "overloaded" primary curriculum. Hence, if parents could act as home tutors, then teachers' efforts in encouraging parents to get involved would have been worthwhile. At the least, barriers between home and school could be whittled away so that parents would come to value the efforts of the school, ensure their children's attendance and show that they supported the school so that pressure on hard-pressed teachers could be eased.
Whilst sympathetic to the hard-working teachers, the authors go on to argue that schools could be placing children from disadvantaged homes in a "double bind." Children whose parents operated in ways approved by the school were likely to be those least in need of additional help and most likely to benefit from the strategies advocated by the school.
Overall, they concluded that perceptions of parental involvement by teachers and schools represented less a partnership than a "colonisation of home by school". They argued that a new view of parental involvement is needed which might require teachers to have a better understanding of the social conditions of identity construction, a fuller understanding of the demands of literacy and numeracy pedagogy and more time to prioritise curriculum demands.
Specifically, they recommended that before teachers engage in negotiations with parents about what they might mutually expect, there are a number of conditions in their initial training, professional development and working contexts which should be met:
- updating teachers' explicit understandings of the complexities of teaching literacy and numeracy so their expectations of parents build on what they can offer as parents;
- improving teachers' understanding of the limits of self esteem and the importance of social conditions in the development of children's sense of who they are. They can then work more effectively to help parents help their children by starting from where the parents are; and
- reducing curriculum delivery demands on primary teachers so they can adapt curriculum priorities flexibly to meet the needs of their local communities.
While acknowledging that this represents "yet another wish-list" the authors argue that any response to the question "why bother with parental involvement" has at least partly to be a pedagogic one, based on analysis of how children learn and informed by current theory about teaching and learning. Their report shows that the schools involved in the study were still a long way from approaching parental involvement in this way.
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Implications
In completing this digest the authors began to ask the following questions about implications for practitioners and school leaders:
- the study found that few schools have a clear or explicit rationale for parental involvement – when updating your school’s home-school policy, would it be helpful to spend time discussing the hoped-for benefits of parental involvement with all stake-holders?
- the study found that school needsoften determined the nature of initiatives for parental involvement – do you have a way of finding out what parents think about their child, their child's education and what they view as important?
- the study found that parents were often asked to do tasks for which they were ill-equipped – how can you support parents to help their children’s learning? Can you find out about and build on what parents know and can do?
- the study found that the parents needing most support to help their children were least likely to become involved in home school initiatives – would it be helpful to find out how other schools have tackled this difficult issue? (See ‘Where can I find out more?’)
- the study found that few schools evaluated the success of their strategies for parental involvement, either by keeping records of the extent of parental involvement or by trying to find out whether or not such efforts contributed to increased learning - how do you attempt to evaluate the effectiveness of home-school contacts?
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Where can I find out more?
This practical guide includes a range of materials to develop policies that improve home school relationships:
Alexander, T, Bastiani, J and Beresford, E,Jet Publications, 1995 Home/school policies – a practical guide, (available from Jet Publications, 67 Musters Road, Ruddington, Nottingham, NG11 6JB)
Websites of interest:
There is useful information on the website of the Neighbourhood Renewal Unit, and a helpful over-view on what has been found to work in home-school liaison can be found at:
The QCA offers advice on effective home school liaison that can be found at:
The Parent Centre
Advisory Centre for Education