Involving parents in education

The relationship between families and schools in OECD countries is shifting. Both are intimately involved in children's education, but the aspects for which they are responsible, and how that responsibility is delineated, varies over time and cultures, and changes with the economic and political climate.l

Three factors are combining to make the roles of family, school and community in education more widely recognised. Formal education is becoming ever more important; its methods are more diverse and its purposes more complex; and the awareness is spreading that in the future most people will have to keep learning throughout their lives is spreading.' Parental involvement in the education of their children is now associated with higher achievement. That perception complements other trends: a general movement towards decentralisation and local autonomy, with many governments now wanting to make state schools more accountable to their 'clients', and more parents exerting pressure on politicians for a wider choice of schooling.

In many countries parents see their involvement as a democratic right; in some, indeed, like France, Germany and Denmark, it has been a legal entitlement for decades. And the idea of accountability - making more public both the financial arrangements and the successes and failures of individual schools - has been embraced more or less enthusiastically in the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States. The aim of this shift in policy is to make schools more responsive to the demands and wishes of the parents who entrust their children to them, and to the taxpayers who fund them.

Governments have a number of reasons for encouraging parental involvement. There are efficiency effects. A belief in consumer choice insists that parents, as consumers, should be able to choose schools, and to influence the way in which they operate. The underlying assumption is that if parents think of themselves as consumers, they are more likely to be clear about what they want, and to be more critical of what they are being offered - thus pushing schools into responding to their demands more effectively.

Governments are also aware that parental involvement can be a lever for raising standards. Findings from large-scale studies in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States show that schools in which pupils do well (in terms of both academic attainment and positive attitudes to learning) are characterised by good relations between home and school.

Involvement can also tackle disadvantage and improve equity3 when the performance of individual children is raised by showing their parents how to support them more effectively at home a consideration that is particularly important when there are cultural differences between the values of the education system and those of the family. In some countries, including Canada, England and Wales, France and the United States, policy-makers are turning to schools for solutions or help with issues such as drug and alcohol abuse by teenagers, sexual promiscuity and teenage pregnancy, child abuse, violence and gang-based street-cultures.

There are also financial considerations. Not only do parents raise extra funds for schools, but they can be a very cost-effective way of mobilising resources in other forms: as helpers on school visits, for example, as coaches or assistants in sporting activities, or as teachers' aides in the classroom.

Associative Action

The extent of parental involvement varies considerably from country to country, most being strong in some aspects and weak in others, and governments encourage it to different degrees in the different tiers of education. Legislation can achieve only a limited amout, of course, although it can encourage parental participation in policymaking and governance, both nationally and locally. They can give parents the legal right to form parents' associations. They can offer parents a wider choice of school (although complete freedom of choice is never really possible without retaining an uneconomic number of spare places in the system). They can require local authorities and schools to communicate particular kinds of information to parents. In England and Wales, for example, schools must give parents certain details concerning the curriculum, the academic performance of the school in relation to the national average and of other schools in the area, and information on their children's progress in comparison to national norms.

Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland and Spain all have parents sitting on important policymaking committees in national or state governments. In Canada, a number of provinces have recently set up parent advisory committees, and similarly some US states have parental representation on the advisory committes of district school boards. In England and Wales and Japan, by contrast, parents are not represented on either kind of board.

Parental participation in schools themselves takes a wide variety of forms. Recent OECD research on education indicators estimated the extent to which parents are involved in decision-making processes within primary schools.4 In the 12 countries covered by the survey, j7% of primary pupils are judged to be in schools in which parents participate in financial or organisational decisions. Fewer than one in four attends a school where parents have influence over staffing.

The extent to which parents are active as school governors differs according to how far countries treat schools as autonomous units. In Japan, Germany and France, for example. individual schools do not have governing bodies; in Germany, though, the school councils - on which parents are represented - can sometimes influence the appointment of a school principal. In Denmark, Ireland and Spain, schools are seen as more autonomous and their school boards, on which parents sit, have real influence on decision-making. The process is probably most advanced in England and Wales, where the governing bodies (which include parents) of individual schools make virtually all the important non-curricular decisions.

In almost all the countries in the study, there are national parents, associations of various kinds, the bulk of them built up through a system of councils or associations based in individual schools. Such associations are not compulsory in any of the countries, although in recent years most governments have begun to encourage them. Some parents, organisations, by contrast, are of very long-standing and - in France and Japan, for example - are part of the local political establishment; indeed, they are an accepted way for people to enter the political process in general. In Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland and Spain, members of parents' associations sit on national committees and give their opinions. In England and Wales parents are not represented on such bodies, although important policy documents are normally circulated to the National Confederation of Parent-Teacher Associations as part of a routine consultation process.

In Denmark, France, Germany and Spain class councils are a common form of participation, but elsewhere they are barely known. The usual structure is simple: all the parents of the children in a given class, as a group, have regular meetings with the teacher. In Denmark, where teachers often stay with the same class of children throughout the Folkeskole, parents and teachers can come to know one another very well, and parents often have a powerful voice in aspects of school life.

Most governments are also keen to encourage closer relationships between schools and local communities and have put in place an array of impressive pilot projects and local links. But in most instances, the policy has not moved much beyond rhetoric, and what efforts there are tend to be one-off experiments that are rarely built into the fabric of the education system. And yet schools can offer a means of building community spirit - providing, for example, facilities for sports, meetings, adult education classes and other forms of personal and social development, especially in rural areas.

Partnerships between schools and local employers can also be an important source of energy, resources and good will.5 A recent examination of integrated services for children at risk of failing in school (estimated at 15-30%) provided numerous examples of successful cooperation between schools and a variety of local services." There are three examples of innovative central-government initiatives: Ireland's Home-School-Community Liaison Scheme (which serves pupils and supports parents in disadvantaged areas), the Danish policy of designating about one in ten Folkeskoles as local cultural centres for the community, and the French ZEPs (education priority zones).

Apart from Canada and the United States, even, country in the study has a national curriculum, which lays down what should be taught in schools - but its rigidity varies considerably. In Denmark Ireland and Spain parents are represented on the national curriculum committees which establish or revise the curriculum; and in Germany, even, state has a Parents' Council which advises the Ministry of Culture on educational issues. In other countries, such as England and Wales and Japan, parents have no say in national fora on the content or structure of the curriculum. In Canada and the United States, curricula are established by state or provincial governments, without, normally, any input from parents. But many Canadian provinces are currently restructuring their political institutions, and some are setting up Parent Advisory Committees which will be consulted on such matters.

Individual Initiatives

In contrast with these various means of acting in concert, action by individual parents is more widespread, has more direct impact on instruction, and usually targets three particular activities.

The first is direct participation in the classroom - usually as unskilled help or as teachers' aides - which often arouses a degree of controversy. Not all teachers take the idea of partnership seriously, and many parents are unaware of their new respectability. A number of initiatives (in, for example, Canada, England and Wales, Ireland and the United States) demonstrate that both teachers and children can benefit from this kind of co-operation, especially when the children are young. By contrast, primary education in, for example, France, Germany and Japan is delivered very effectively with virtually no parental input of this kind. In these three countries there is a strong consensus as to the purposes and processes of education. Parents are not, of course, any less interested in their children's schooling in these countries, although there may be a more clearly defined demarcation between what takes place in the classroom, and is thus seen as the responsibility of teachers, and home and parental responsibilities.

The importance of parents helping their children at home is now undisputed. The latest figures collected for the OECD's education indicators project suggest that about three-quarters of primary pupils (in the 12 countries surveyed) go to schools which regularly engage parents in actively supporting their children's learning at home. For example, children may be instructed to read passages from a particular book to their parents every night; parents may be asked to sign a notebook when a certain task has been completed- the school may encourage parents to take their children to the public library and show them how to find information for school projects; evening workshops may take place at the school, to explain to parents how they can help their children to develop their understanding of individual subjects.

The most widespread form of communication between home and school is, of course, reporting to parents on the progress of their children, usually two or three times a year. Normally, schools can and do offer more frequent updates, and parents can request a discussion with the child's class teacher. There are also newsletters from school to home. and two-wav homework journals - in which the child details what homework has been set, and the parent signs to confirm that it has been completed- and parents and teachers can communicate by writing notes in the journal. Home visits by teachers are common in some countries (such as Denmark and Japan) but rare in others, where it tends to be seen as a sign of serious problems.

Schools themselves can also offer parents various forms of 'psycho-social support. Wanting to help their child improve his or her performance can encourage parents to attend classes (at the school or elsewhere) covering aspects of the curriculum, good parenting, joint literacy activities, and so on - and they may even go on to take further courses or education programmes on their own account, resulting in increased, and more effective, involvement with the school, sometimes even extending to direct influence on the curriculum (the European Parents Association, for example, gave their Alcuin Award to a Danish teacher for developing the curriculum for her class in close co-operation with her pupils' parents). Especially in areas of socio-economic disadvantage, such courses can increase the confidence and competence of young parents, and encourage them to become more involved - and also to move on to more demanding educational programmes to improve, for example, their own literacy or numeracy, often gaining formal qualifications.

Five central messages emerge for governments wishing to maximise the benefits of involving parents in schools. The first is the publicising and dissemination of examples of successful practice. In those countries which have committed themselves to increasing parental involvement, there is an impressive range of successful projects or experiments that offer concrete examples of what works. Second, successful strategies have to be replicable to allow parents, students and teachers elsewhere to benefit from them instead of simply re-inventing the wheel.

Third, genuine partnership entails mutual respect. Much successful parental involvement comes down to individual teachers and parents learning how to negotiate with each other, to handle differences of opinion and to understand the other s role. Fourth, a clear legal framework should set out rights and responsibilities, supplementing them with training, most fruitfully for teachers and parents training together.

Finally, to make best use of the energy and resources of parents, their educational agenda has to be clearly identified. Consultation with a wide range of community groups and agencies would help policy-makers tap into a broad crosssection of views and experience. It should not be assumed that parents will always want what the government of the day thinks best.

1. Parents as Partners in Schooling, OECD Publications, Paris, 1997. Nine OECD countries were covered by this study Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Spain, the United Kingdom (England and Wales only: Scotland has a separate educational system) and the United States.

2. Jean Claude Pave, Strategies for a Learning Society and Edwin Le:nt,en and Albert Tuijnman, `Life-long Leaning: Who Pays?, The OECD Observer .Vo. 199, Apr-ill/Mf 199G.

3. See also pp. 27-30.

4. Education at a Glance:Analysis, 1996 Edition and Education at a Glance: OECD Indicators, 1996 Edition, OECD Publications, Paris, 1996.

5. Schools and Business: A New Partnership, OECD Publications, Paris 1992. 6. Successful Services for Our Children and Families at Risk, OECD Puhlicatiois, Pais, 1996 apid Peter Evans, Co-ordinating Services for Children at Risk,. The OECD Observer, ?No. 202. October,November 1996.

OECD BIBLIOGRAPHY

Parents as Partners in Schooling, 1997 Jean-Claude Paye, 'Strategies for a Learning Society, The OECD Observer, No. 199, April/May 1996 Edwin Leuven and Albert Tuijnman, 'fe-long Learning: Who Pays?', The OECD Observer, No. 199, April/May 1996

Education at a Glance: Analysis, 1996 Edition, 1996 Education at a Glance: OECD Indicators, 1996 Edition, 1996

Successful Services for Our Children and Families at Risk, 1996

Peter Evans, 'Co-ordinating Services for Children at RisK, The OECD Observer, No. 202, October/November 1996 Schools and Business: A New Partnership, 1992.

Caroline St John-Brooks, now Editor of The Times Educational Supplement, formerly worked in the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation in the OECD Directorate for Education, Employment. Labour and Social Affairs.

E-mail: els.contact@oecd.org

Copyright Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development Oct/Nov 1997
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