Memorandum submitted by the National Family
and Parenting Institute
1. BACKGROUND
1.1 The National Family and Parenting Institute
(NFPI) is an independent charity that works to support parents
in bringing up their children, to promote the wellbeing of families
and to make society more family friendly. It achieves this by:
conducting and analysing research on services; advising Government
and others on family policy; coordinating family and parenting
organisations; producing public information for parents and practitioners;
and campaigning for a "family friendly" society.
1.2 The NFPI is currently undertaking a
project, funded by the Esmee Fairburn Foundation, on parental
involvement in schools. This project aims to promote and improve
relationships between schools and parents through practical examples
and models from successful schools. We are currently scoping activities
undertaken by schools to involve parents, to identify different
models, evaluate good practice and disseminate models.
1.3 This submission outlines emerging messages
from the current study and from previous work NFPI has done is
this area:
— Parent Information Sessions in
Schools (PIP): workshops for parents at key transition points
(ages 5, 11 and 13/14) offering child development knowledge and
information on services and information to support parents. Piloted
and independently evaluated in three localities across England.
The evaluation established that parents attended, appreciated
the offer and assessed themselves as more confident and knowledgeable
following the sessions. Parents have a keen appetite for parenting
support as part of ordinary "school life".
— Fathers' Involvement in Children's
education: [101]
a review of the evidence on the outcomes of fathers' involvement
in children's education and the activities in schools that successfully
involve fathers to illustrate and disseminate good practice.
— Briefing Paper on Aspirations
and Expectations: a review of the evidence on children's aspirations,
their impact on children's outcomes with a view to understanding
the levers that might be used to encourage aspiration.
1.4 An initial message from our early discussion
group work to shape the Esmee Fairburn project, is that generally
schools have fully embraced the message that parental involvement
in schools can be beneficial. Consequently there is a great deal
of work being undertaken by schools under this rubric. The key
goal for schools is improving children's educational achievements
and therefore parental involvement is of interest in the belief
that it will assist schools to improve. However, the emerging
picture is of a confusion of aims which could be greatly eased
by the clarification of what is meant by the terms: parental involvement;
parenting support; parent representation; and parental choice.
Such clarification would enable schools to develop parent strategies
that encompass menus of activities and include partnerships and
structures to support the achievement of better outcomes for children,
based on the specific environment within which each school is
located.
1.5 As a result of confused, and sometimes
competing aims, activities that schools develop seem to have a
variety of objectives:
— Increasing parents' aspirations for
their children and their interest in schooling;
— Increasing parents' direct support
to their children's learning through educational activities—reading,
understanding maths, etc;
— Improving parenting skills;
— Parents' own education;
— Parents supporting school activities
through participation in school events, fundraising, classroom
and sport involvement;
— Improving children's behaviour;
— Community and neighbourhood involvement
and renewal; and
— Reducing the impact of community
tensions (around ethnicity, particularly) on pupils' behaviour
with each other.
2. PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT
IN SCHOOLS
2.1 Our early discussion group work has
demonstrated that there is a tendency to define family and parenting
support as work that the school does to support parenting, and
to define parental involvement in schools as activities that engage
families and parents in supporting the school and its aims.
2.2 Although parents in an advisory role
would be beneficial for flagging up concerns such as bullying
and to enhance teachers' understanding of the locality in which
the school is situated and differing cultural backgrounds, NFPI
has concerns over the practicalities of parents setting up and
running schools. The White Paper is very thin on detail as to
how this would be achieved and it may prove to be just too complicated.
NFPI's discussion forums focusing on parental involvement show
that there appears to be much less interest in the idea of parents'
shaping school activity or environment than in involvement of
parents in school governance.
2.3 NFPI welcomes the requirement for all
Trust schools to have parent councils and would like to see this
proposal widened to all schools. Parent councils and local authorities
are the voice of parents and must therefore have sufficient sanctions
at their disposal to ensure that schools follow recommendations
made.
2.4 However, the parents most likely to
engage in advisory roles are unlikely to be representative of
all parents within the school as a whole. Therefore there would
need to be a concerted effort to ensure equality of opportunity
for parents in involvement, to protect against colonisation by
particular demographics of parents who are more comfortable in
those settings.
2.5 The Commission on Families and the Wellbeing
of Children's inquiry[102]
into the upbringing of children concluded that schools may need
to provide compensatory help for children who do not have sufficient
home support and to engage parents in ways that do not leave some
disadvantaged families feeling de-skilled and incompetent. There
would therefore be some benefit in exploring whether parental
involvement actually means parental involvement in learning or
practical involvement in the mechanics of the school.
2.6 Feedback from NFPI's discussion forums
indicates that activities in individual schools around parental
involvement appear to have developed outside of a whole school
strategy on partnership with parents. There is felt to be an absence
of resources and models that can help with planning and delivering
a strategy that would suit individual localities, their intake
and the communities the school serves. This initial work has exposed
a lack of ideas about how parental involvement could be managed,
for example through market research, questionnaires, feedback
sessions, etc.
3. PARENTAL CHOICE
3.1 A recent briefing paper commissioned
by NFPI[103]
demonstrated that parents own experiences of school and lack of
aspirations for themselves may influence any expectations for
their children. Parental aspirations for their children can affect
the choices made with regard to school—or even whether they
consider that there is value in bothering to make a choice. The
briefing also showed that parental involvement in school from
secondary age doesn't have such a strong impact as parental aspirations
for their children. This suggests that increasing choice will
not necessarily help those from the most disadvantaged backgrounds
at secondary school age.
3.2 Likewise, our discussion forums have
found little enthusiasm for parental choice. Parental choice is
seen as a shorthand for unequal access to good schools and assumed
to lead to greater achievement gaps, difficulties in developing
schools as service hubs, and difficulties in building good community
relations within a locality. There is seen to be a fundamental
contradiction between the "choice" agenda and the "respect"
and children's achievement agendas.
3.3 The Commission on Families and the Wellbeing
of Children also advocated caution with regard to parental choice,
suggesting that choice was not a reality for families in areas
where the best school is oversubscribed and highlighting that
the process works in favour of advantaged parents who can navigate
the system better. The Commission recommended a less competitive
approach with an emphasis on providing good local schools within
the context of local community needs.
3.4 Fair school admissions are essential
to underpin the Government's policies on choice and increased
access. However, unless all schools are to be required to abide
by the code of practice on school admissions, and other relevant
protocols on hard to reach children, the attainment gaps between
children from deprived backgrounds and those from more affluent
backgrounds will remain. Poor and vulnerable families will continue
to be discriminated against, not only because of differences in
school quality but also through attendance polices and achievement
targets that militate against taking on challenging pupils.
3.5 NFPI welcomes the additional funding
for schools to offer information sessions to parents at key transition
stages—when starting primary school, or moving to secondary
school. NFPI is also pleased to see that local authorities will
be expected to provide additional support for looked after children
by offering pastoral support or developing more proactive links
with foster parents.
3.6 The increase in eligibility for transport
to schools to support the most deprived children is to be welcomed,
but unless the unfairness within the schools admissions system
is addressed it will fail to increase access to other schools
for poorer children. In addition, these transport proposals will
achieve very little in rural settings where very few children
have access to more than one school within the set six mile radius.
3.7 Conversely, encouraging children to
travel out of their immediate locality to school may also lessen
the likelihood of parental involvement within the school, as presumably
there is no intention of providing transport for parents who want
to be involved in the school. It could also lessen attendance
at parents evening etc as there may be difficulties in getting
to the school. And of course for the children who do manage to
attend a better school, away from their deprived neighbourhood,
there could be issues of peer alienation within their locality
and this could indeed be true for parents.
3.8 Nevertheless NFPI supports the intention
to improve information available to parents and is gratified to
see the funds dedicated this over the next two years, to support
choice advisors. However, the impact of this investment will be
minimal unless discrepancies within the admissions system are
rectified.
4. PARENTING
SUPPORT
4.1 The White Paper rightly acknowledges
the need for schools to be an essential part of the Every Child
Matters (ECM) agenda but runs the risk of under-valuing the key
role that local authorities play within that agenda through addressing
the attainment gaps within communities as a whole. The over-riding
message is contradictory, with an insufficient requirement for
local authority involvement in planning extended services. If
schools are not to be community-based schools, but take children
from wide catchment areas, this will have implications for the
schools as both service hubs and the centre of community cohesion
within the extended schools vision. It also gives mixed messages
about exactly what parents' roles could be.
4.2 NFPI's discussion forums have revealed
less conviction about how schools could develop into `service
hubs', offering family and parenting support, the impact this
might have on the school culture and how it might be done. Here
the anxiety is that schools are being asked to "sort"
dysfunctional families and anti-social behaviour.
4.3 For some children, school is the most
stable element in their lives and in many instances school is
the location where children's unhappiness and difficulties are
first identified. Schools are then well placed to provide a non-stigmatising
early response to prevent difficulties from escalating into more
deep-seated and harder to remedy problems. The suggestion from
the White Paper that, through parents exercising their right to
choice, schools' intake of children could potentially be from
wider and more dissipated areas runs counter to the main impetus
of local safeguarding strategies within the ECM agenda, and will
certainly do nothing to increase community cohesion or local regeneration.
4.4 Therefore NFPI welcomes the requirement
for schools to have staff members who have training in multi-agency
work in child protection. Where children are accessing other services
it is essential that personalised learning arrangements can support
these services to achieve common working agreements to ensure
better outcomes for each child. In order to achieve this, schools
must be part of the wider service provision for children and families
within the ECM framework.
4.5 Feedback from NFPI's discussion forums
has shown a strong interest in parenting support being available
and a willingness for schools to play a part in this. There is
real disquiet over the absence of services for families with serious
relationship and behaviour problems, whose children are either
involved in difficult behaviour or are prevented from benefiting
from schooling. Schools are seen as an integral part of the solution,
not through delivering parenting support, but through providing
a location for that support. However there remains uncertainty
about how this could be managed and even more essentially, how
it will be resourced.
4.6 NFPI is concerned by proposals that
will allow schools to issue parenting orders. It is hard to envisage
how schools can be simultaneously the place where parents and
families are expected to turn to for support when they encounter
difficulties and are struggling, and yet also the place that penalises
those same parents for failing to cope. Aside from the difficulty
for schools in issuing and enforcing orders whilst managing an
increased service provision, this remit suggests that schools
will be unable to gain the trust of the very families that the
Government seeks to help through the ECM agenda.
4.7 Likewise, the requirement that parents
will need to take responsibility for supervising the first five
days of a child's exclusion from school to ensure that they carry
out schoolwork, or else be liable to a fine if their child is
found in a public space, does not easily fit with the Government's
welfare to work agenda. Many parents work full time out of necessity
and because they have been encouraged to by Government. It may
not be easy to take time off work, or to find alternative supervision.
The requirement to do so may be especially galling if the problems
that led to the exclusion were to some extent seen by the parent
to have been exacerbated by being required to work as a result
of Government initiatives.
5. THE FUTURE
5.1 The NFPI project will be developing
resources for schools to assist in developing their parents' strategy,
attempting to define a range of models to achieve different goals
and disseminating good practice ideas.
5.2 Reaching all parents continues to be
a challenge. The extended schools model, which provides services
for parents and families alongside education for children, is
being developed in a number of areas. Developing these extended
schools into service `hubs' that meet the needs of the whole community
is an essential component of the ECM agenda and requires commitment
and adequate resources to deliver for those families most in need.
5.3 The idea of parents becoming involved
in setting up and running schools could be harder to replicate.
It may actually prove to run counter to the aims to improve the
five outcomes for children identified in ECM. It also raises the
question of how to support parents who are interested but don't
have the confidence, time or skills required—and how to
support those families who will still be penalised by the admissions
system.
November 2005
101 Goldman, R (2005). Fathers' Involvement in their
Children's Education; National Family and Parenting Institute. Back
102
Commission on Families and the Wellbeing of Children (2005) Families
and the state: Two-way support and responsibilities. An inquiry
into the relationship between the state and the family in the
upbringing of children; Policy Press, London. Back
103
Ritchie, C, Flouri, E and Buchanan, A (2005) Aspirations and
Expectations; Centre for Research into Parenting and Children,
University of Oxford. Back
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