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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‘Parents in Partnership’

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Walter Humes speech to SSBA Conference
on 19th March, 2005

Parental Involvement in Education

Introduction

Thank you for inviting me again to your annual conference. I must have behaved myself reasonably well last year to be asked back. Not always the case. I have this distressing tendency of not necessarily telling an audience what it wants to hear. I see my role on occasions such as these as raising critical issues, asking some hard questions, not with a view to telling others what they should do, but to inform thinking and to stimulate debate. The SSBA will wish to make its response to the draft bill and consultation paper. It is not for me to tell you what you should say. But I hope some of the points I raise will contribute to your own internal discussions.

The creation of School Boards in 1988 needs to be understood as a political act - part of an agenda to reduce the power of professionals, increase the rights of consumers (defined as parents rather than pupils) and make local authorities more accountable. It was hoped that a significant number of schools might wish to opt out of local authority control, thereby weakening what was seen by the Conservative government of the time as a dependency culture, over-reliant on public service provision. The fact that this did not happen can be interpreted in two ways:

• As evidence of the deep-seated nature of that dependency culture, with parents unwilling to take responsibility for changing the direction of Scottish education.

• As evidence of a fairly high level of satisfaction among parents with the existing arrangements for educational provision, including the role of local authorities and the professionalism of teachers.

The fact that Conservative education policies were subsequently rejected at successive general elections may make the second interpretation more credible than the first but I shall want to return to one aspect of the first interpretation later.

The subsequent history of School Boards has been a mixed story. Some have been successful, others less so. The SSBA has a number of achievements to its credit:

• It has raised awareness among parents about the importance of their role in their children’s education.

• It has been able to lobby government on a range of policy issues.

• It has run a series of successful conferences and produced some useful publications.

• It has contributed to the strengthening of partnerships between parents and local authorities.

• It has campaigned for the educational rights of particular groups, especially the parents of children with additional support needs.

All this is highly commendable. At the same time, however, it has to be acknowledged that not everything has been an unqualified success. This, it should be said, is not surprising since no organization develops without encountering some difficulties:

• The level of parental interest in School Board elections has been disappointing.

• SSBA has had its internal difficulties and has sometimes been engaged in unhelpful disputes with the Scottish Parent Teacher Council. (I noted with interest that in the George Street research report on parents’ views it was said many parents used the terms PTA and School Board interchangeably).

• The majority of parents currently have low levels of involvement with schools and, where involvement does occur, it is likely to be of an informal rather than a formal kind and likely to be more evident in the early rather than later stages of schooling.

• There is little evidence to suggest that School Boards have managed to engage the interest of those parents whose children are sometimes described as the disappointed, the disaffected and the disappeared.

• There is a perception - no doubt unfair in most cases - that some School Board members pursue individual agendas and do not represent the views of the majority of parents.

It is against this background that the new proposals have been introduced. The principal aim, as set out in the Ministerial Foreword, is ‘to achieve stronger, more inclusive and effective parental involvement in all aspects of education ‘. Will the proposals, if implemented in their present form, actually achieve this? Or will the removal of the current statutory provisions actually serve to weaken the role of parents in education? I want to say something both about the process by which the current proposals have emerged and the substance of what is contained in the draft bill.

The Process

An important part of the argument in favour of what is being recommended is that is informed by a qualitative research study commissioned by the Executive. This is in line with a general move in government to develop policies that are ‘evidence informed’. In other words it is claimed that, instead of coming up with policies that are based on party dogma or political ideology, government now seeks to draw on the findings of research to support the initiatives it brings forward. In principle, this is fine but a great deal depends on the precise remit for the research, the details of the methodology, the sample size and balance, and the expertise of the researchers. All of these need to be scrutinized if the quality of the research evidence is to be judged. Questionnaires and interviews can be useful methods of gathering information but they are subject to a number of potential weaknesses:

• Questions need to be framed carefully if they are not to produce biased findings.

• Account needs to be taken of the fact that return rates from questionnaires are often low and so care needs to be taken in drawing conclusions from a minority of those canvassed.

• The motivations of those who give interview responses will be varied and this will affect the value that can be placed of their comments. It will often be very difficult to determine individual motivations.

There is also a more general question relating to the current fashion for ‘evidence-informed’ policy. What counts as evidence? How do you weight the experience of, say, an individual parent who has had a tough time negotiating the system in order to secure adequate provision for a child with special needs against the collective views of parents whose children have progressed through the system unproblematically? The ‘hard case’ may actually reveal much more about the assumptions underlying everyday practice.

The commissioned research looked only at the views of parents on their own involvement in the education of their children. But there are others with a legitimate interest in the role of parents. The education system has a number of stakeholders, none of whom has a monopoly of interest. Most teachers recognize the value of parental involvement and their views on the kind of contribution that parents might make would be worth knowing. There are difficult and sensitive issues here to do with the nature and limits of professionalism, legitimate systems of accountability, and questions of empowerment and disempowerment. To consider the views of parents in isolation may fail to take proper account of the complexity of the issues.

Then, of course, there are the views of children and young people themselves. After all, the whole enterprise is carried out for their benefit and they have a right to be heard on matters that directly affect them. There is now much greater emphasis on children’s rights and this is reflected in some official reports which contain fascinating material about their perspective on the way in which they are treated by the system – the report on children looked after by local authorities, commissioned during Cathy Jamieson’s term of office as Education Minister, was a good example of this. It would be interesting to know what the views of young people are on parental involvement. I would predict that most youngsters would welcome parental interest and support, but I suspect there would be areas of sensitivity, especially among adolescents, where they might want a degree of distance between the home and the school. This is a natural part of development, linked to questions of identity formation and a desire for greater freedom and independence. Many of the tensions surrounding adolescence derive from the clash between the natural desire for parents to protect youngsters from making wrong choices and the equally natural desire of young people to assert their independence and make their own choices, even if some of them turn out to be mistakes. Once again, my point is that the issues surrounding parental involvement are perhaps more complex that either the consultation paper or the commissioned research allows.

There is one other aspect of the process I want to comment on before offering a few observations on the substance of what is being proposed. We are at the consultation stage and it is important to ask how the consultation responses will be analysed and used to inform the final decisions. It certainly has been a feature of post-devolution Scotland that more consultations have taken place than was the case under the old Scottish Office. Simply having a consultation, however, does not mean that it will make much of a difference to the outcome. There are a number of questions to be asked:

• Is there a protocol on how consultation responses are analysed?

• If so, on what principles is it based?

• How are the ideas of individuals, pressure groups, professional organizations and NDPBs assessed? Is there some kind of weighting involved?

• How are consultation responses fed into policy discussions?

• Who controls the agenda of these discussions?

In the run-up to devolution we heard a great deal about a Scottish Parliament being more open, responsive and democratic than its predecessor. Should we be concerned about an apparent gap between the rhetoric and the reality in post-devolution Scotland?

The Substance

I only want to make a few comments about the substance of the recommendations because I am sure these will feature prominently in your workshop discussions.

The main proposal has to do with the removal of School Boards and their replacement with Forums. The precise nature of these Forums is left very open and it is expected that they will take a number of different forms, depending on local circumstances and the preferences of different parental groups. This vagueness might be defended on the grounds that it moves away from a ‘one size fits all’ approach. On the other hand it may lead to very patchy provision, with much depending on the efforts of a few enthusiasts. Where is the evidence that School Forums will actually lead to an increase in parental involvement. That is the hope but is it based on anything more than aspiration? And is there not a danger that what will happen is the devolution of responsibility to schools and local authorities but without a corresponding devolution of power? I have to say that I detect a general trend in this direction in all areas of public policy and within individual professional fields. It can be seen in the health service and in social work as well as education.

I have another concern. It is that the focus of Forum discussions will be too localized and insufficiently connected to broader issues of educational policy. It is perfectly natural that parents will be concerned about specific practical matters relating to their children’s school – matters such as communication between the school and the home, access to teachers, the quality of accommodation, the discipline policy, school meals, transport, health and safety, how bullying is dealt with, primary-secondary transition, and so on. But one of the most interesting findings of the George Street research was that parents are primarily concerned about the welfare of their own child. The implication is that they are rather less concerned about the system as a whole. A degree of individualism is to be expected but if we are to improve the quality of provision for all, we need to encourage a broader perspective. I think one of the challenges facing parental groups is to promote a greater interest among parents about bigger educational issues than those which simply relate to the local school. Where are schools going? What should schools of the future look like? What kind of curriculum will serve the needs of the 21^st century? How can information technology be used most effectively to enhance children’s learning? Do we have the balance right between the teaching of basic skills and the encouragement of enterprise, imagination and creativity? These seem to me to be legitimate questions for parents to ask. Will the new Forums provide an adequate arena in which to raise these questions or will they be solely preoccupied with local issues and immediate practical questions?

If I were of a conspiratorial turn of mind, I might suggest that government – any government – does not like too many people asking hard policy questions and that the intention in what is now proposed is to domesticate and control the kind of contribution that parents might make. And even if that is only partly true, we are left with an important conclusion. It is that, just as the creation of School Boards was a political act, so their proposed abolition is also a political act. I would suggest that in your internal discussions you need to give some consideration to the political motivation behind what is now proposed. And, depending on your conclusions, you may need to deploy some political techniques in advancing an alternative view. There comes a point in any campaign when you have to be prepared to get your hands dirty. I wish you well in your efforts.

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