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Children's Understandings of Parental Involvement in Education
Researchers: Ms Pam Alldred, Professor Miriam David, Dr Rosalind Edwards, Social Sciences Research Centre, South Bank University
Contact: Dr Rosalind Edwards, Social Sciences Research Centre, South Bank University, 103 Borough Road, London SE1 0AA
Tel: 0171 815 5795, Fax: 0171 815 5799, Email: edwardra@sbu.ac.uk
Duration of Research: August 1997 - July 1999
Background Information
There is a wide-ranging consensus that parents' involvement in their children's education is both necessary and beneficial. Education policy stresses parental choice and responsibilities, and strategies have been developed to encourage parental participation at home and at school and to link home and school more effectively. However, there is little knowledge about the part that children play in the process of parental involvement in education. We cannot answer key questions about whether:
children like and facilitate, or dislike and limit, links between home and school;
children prefer mothers' or fathers' involvement or see either as appropriate, in what ways and under what circumstances; and
girls and boys, from different backgrounds, and at different ages, have different experiences and understandings.
This in-depth study will foreground children's collective and individual experiences and perspectives on parents' involvement in their education both in the family and home setting, and in the formal educational environment of the school. It will take account of the broader meanings of 'family' and 'education', and how these interact, in children's lives.
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Study Design
The research will use a mix of group and individual interviews with 70 primary and secondary school children in contrasting locations and from a diversity of backgrounds. The group interviews will give us insight into peer group norms around whether, and what ways, parents should be involved in children's education. The individual interviews will allow us to understand a particular child's experiences of involvement from their own mother and/or father. In both group and individual interviews, the topic of mothers' and fathers' participation in a wide range of daily and intermittent school curricula and other educational activities will be addressed, as will the settings (school and home) in which these take place. Examples of areas of parental involvement to be addressed include homework, computers and/or games, school outings, parental consultation evenings, and school governance, as well as children's role in communication between home and school through carrying letters and so on.
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Policy And Academic Implications
The study will facilitate understanding of how children, collectively and individually, negotiate parental involvement in their education across the two important settings of home and school.
In terms of policy implications, the findings will be useful to education policy-makers and practitioners. They will be of relevance to policy discussions of parental involvement in children's education, especially home-school contracts currently taking place, and also to more local developments in home-school relations within local education authorities (LEAs) and in individual schools. Representatives of organisations with an interest in children's issues generally and/or education will be involved throughout the research.
Academically, the research will make a contribution to theoretical developments within the sociologies of childhood, including the relationship between agency and structure in children's lives. It will also broaden the focus of research into parental involvement through applying perspectives and concerns from the sociologies of childhood to an area of education research that has largely ignored children's understandings and role.
More generally, the research will contribute towards recognition of children's activity within society, and can help inform children themselves, as well as their parents, about aspects of their lives.
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