Conference

2008 Safe Internet Use

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Highlights of previous SSBA conferences :-

2007 Developing a Parent Council and Encouraging Parental Involvement

2006 The Way Forward for Parental Involvement

2005 Parents in Partnership

2003 Partnerships and responsibilities

2002 SSBA is fit for the future

2001 Roadshow

2000 International
and published book
available here online

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Workshops
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Parental Involvement beyond the rhetoric:
what do staff really think about it?

Within any school situation there are a variety of roles and perceptions of the roles that parents can play. Parents and staff will all have views on the benefits and/or costs of parental involvement, and ft cannot be assumed that they will be in agreement. Farquhar et al (1985) in comparing the views of parents and teachers found distinct differences between the two groups. If we add to this equation the other stakeholders, the headteacher and nursery nurse classroom assistants then it is clear that there are tensions to be explored and this is the focus of this paper.

The area of interest addressed here is that the different stakeholders in the nursery will have different experiences of the costs and benefits of school based parental involvement and may have different understandings of who could and should benefit from school based parental involvement. Thus any evaluation of the success of school based parental involvement initiatives, since they do not have a shared base, will be seen differently in terms of success by the different stakeholders. This could lead to potential conflict which without a shared and clear understanding of what all of the stakeholders understand by a successful scheme, could place the future of these schemes could be placed in jeopardy. It may be possible to develop a model to demonstrate the cost benefit dimension of school based parental involvement. In this paper, which is the first part of a longer project, I am concerned to discover the views of the staff stakeholders; the headteacher's, the nursery nurse / classroom assistants and the nursery teachers on school based parental involvement.

The paper provides firstly a discussion about terminology, what is meant and understood by the terms parental involvement / participation / collaboration and co-operation and then a discussion of the term parent. Even with changes in the division of labour, with the increasing paid employment of women but increasing unemployment of men, school based parental involvement is largely in the domain of mothers. So why is the term parent used almost universally'.? Naively this use of the term parent in the place of mother can be seen as simple shorthand, for 'parent' read 'mother'. But as Reay (1998) has noted this ungendered nature of school based parental involvement is so widespread that mothers in fact have become "hidden from view'.

A brief historical background to parental involvement is then provided and the UK context is described. The theoretical background to school based parental involvement is presented with reference made to previous research in this field. The project that this paper summarises is one designed to elicit the views of staff and the method of data collection used is considered and the problems encountered described and discussed.

The findings of the project are described and then analysed with the following three themes emerging Firstly, there is a rhetoric surrounding parental involvement in general and this encompasses the school-based involvement of mothers. ft is almost as if parental involvement has become the sacred cow of early years' education, beyond criticism, above reproach. This is perpetuated by the major texts, very few of which offer any critical account any aspect of parental involvement. Their major focus tends to concentrate on discussions about what constitutes parental involvement, how ft is defined and how it is implemented. Where there are critiques these tend to be provided in journal papers. Could it be the case that teachers and nursery nurses / classroom assistants in training, and their tutors, tend to focus on the practicalities of how to organise parental involvement rather than on the more fundamental questions as to what it is for ?

A second theme that emerged was that where there is successful school based mothers' involvement this appeared to be where staff held positive views about parental involvement and further believed that theirs was the venue where it was particularly valuable. Here there appears to be a link with the socio-economic catchment area of the school. There were specific examples of schools in socio-economically disadvantaged areas that appeared to have a particular commitment to school-based mothers' involvement. This was evident in the responses from all three of the staff stakeholder groups. It might be related to the view held by some nursery nurses/classroom assistants that parenting skills could be improved by means of school-based mothers' involvement which leads into the third and final theme to emerge. From the responses it was clear that there was a significant shared understanding of what is meant by the term 'parental involvement'. However it became clear that there is no shared understanding about what it is for, who is to benefit from it and whose needs are to be met as a result of it. This is a very significant finding since it is all too easy for tensions to arise where there is no clear baseline. For example, if a headteacher sees the benefit of school-based involvement as improved self esteem of the mothers but the nursery staff believe the focus to be the children, then the activities that mothers are invited to take part in by the nursery staff, might meet the needs of the children but not the needs of the mothers. Do some of the nursery nurses/classroom assistants subscribe to a deficit view of mothers' involvement, in that mothers need to learn how to become better mothers as a means of improving the life chances of their children. This compares with teaching staff who indicated more that they and the mothers can team from each other to the benefit of all concerned. When we add to this the fourth stakeholder group, that of the mothers themselves then there is potential for even greater confusion. This is the focus for the research which follows, to discover from mothers why they became involved in school-based activity, what was the motivation and what was the impact on them.

Iris Keating

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