EDITORIAL
The most productive partnership for every child and family
Peter Garrigan, 21 March 2010
The body of literature on the benefits and outcomes of parent engagement in education continues to expand at a rapid rate. Web sites and links, online publications and yearly bibliographies and literature reviews abound. There is more information on the vital importance of families working in partnership with educators than any one person can keep track of.
The evidence is consistent, positive, and convincing: families have a major influence on their children’s achievement in school and through life. The research continues to grow and build an ever-strengthening case. When schools, families, and community groups work together to support learning, children tend to do better in school, stay in school longer, and like school more.
As importantly, such positive partnerships assist in young people’s social and emotional development, their resilience and well-being, their own sense of belonging and a positive, optimistic outlook for the future. These elements are important contributory elements of their learning capability and assist each child to achieve their full potential.
Parent involvement is a common vehicle and starting point for bringing teachers and parents together in schools. Parent involvement programs tend to be initiated and directed by the school and attempt to involve parents in school activities and/or teach parents specific skills and strategies for reinforcing school tasks at home. At this initial stage of parental involvement, parents are typically asked to serve in roles as audience, spectators, fund raisers, aids and organisers
So how does parent involvement satisfy the agenda of parents and the local community? By itself, it doesn’t. Parents who are involved serve the school’s agenda by doing the things educators ask or expect them to do – whilst knowledge, voice and decision-making continue to rest with educators and departmental bureaucrats
With parent involvement, the focus is placed on what parents can do to help the school realise its intended outcomes for children, not on what the parents’ hopes, dreams or intentions for their children may be or on what the school can do to help parents realise their personal or family agendas. The viewpoint seems to be one of seeking to determine what parents can do for teachers, rather than what schools can do for families and the community.
Parent engagement, a relationship that is different from parent involvement, is a deeper and richer level of co-operation to bring teachers and parents working constructively together in schools.
The word engagement can be defined as contact by fitting seamlessly together – the smooth mutual meshing of gears. The implication is that each person engaged is an integral and essential part of the process, brought into the act because of care and commitment. By extension, engagement implies enabling parents to take their place alongside educators in the schooling of their children, fitting together their knowledge of their children, teaching and learning, with teachers’ knowledge. With parental engagement there is a mutually determined and mutually beneficial agenda being shared and advanced in cooperation by educators and parents.
With parental engagement no longer are educators working alone to design and enact policies, procedures, programs, schedules and routines for the sole benefit of children in the community. Instead, educators are entering a community to create with parents a shared world on the ground of school – a world in which parent knowledge and teacher knowledge both inform decision-making, the determination of agenda, and the intended outcomes of their efforts for children, families, the community and the school.
Parents’ engagement in their children’s learning makes a difference – to their children and to their children’s achievement and success in a wide range of educational outcomes. It can make a vast difference for educators and to the landscape of the educational environment.
From positive engagement of this kind, there develop close, sustainable partnerships which bring together the complementary skills and resources of parents, families, educators and build their linkages with the wider community – in ways that not only contribute to maximising the growth, development and educational achievement of each young person: but also the personal and professional growth and development of each and all of the partners.
Peter Garrigan is ACSSO President; this editorial was adapted from his paper to the recent AEU National Conference in Melbourne.
This is music to my ears. However, having tried to initiate discussion about the Family-School Partnerships Framework as a P&C, we quickly found out that schools are not interested. Seemingly, teachers, unions and Principal associations run the agenda and parents are not considered necessary.
I really do wonder why there isn’t a concerted national push by parent bodies to bring these initiatives to the top of their agendas. Given that parents are seeking information on schools and some sort of accountability, it seems that organisations such as yourselves should be pushing parent engagement strategies.
The MySchool debacle illustrated that there are strong views on what information should be in the public arena. I think it is mainly due to parents being left out of the process of educating their children. I read a great quote the other day: “The purpose of a school is to help a family educate a child.” If this is true, then why aren’t families seen as a major stakeholder?
This is a fabulous editorial. Well done Peter. It’s important to acknowledge sources though!
Thanks for your supportive and encouraging comments, Danielle, which are greatly appreciated.
Puzzled though by your oblique reference to sources you feel have not been appropriately acknowledged. For the sake of brevity and space Peter referred broadly, generally and inclusively to the consistent findings of a range of reference and research materials which are published and accessible in other areas of the ACSSO website.
If you advise any aspects which you consider should be specifically referenced, I shall be most happy to add those references appropriately.
Best wishes
Mary: you have provided an excellent summation which goes right to the core of the conundrum the national parent organisation have been grappling with over the past decade as we have sought to promote the issue which has been our whole action agenda through these ten years of strenuous effort – the establishment at all levels of education of positive, informed and sustainable partnerships between parents, teachers and school communities.
The research evidence in Australia and around the world of the importance and benefits to young people’s learning and positive personal development – and of promoting social inclusion – is consistent, compelling and incontrovertible. This began with the work of Joyce Epstein and her team at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore in the 1970′s which still continues; twenty years of work by the SEDL group in the USA, and the Harvard University Family Project which has been running over the same period and is ongoing. Parallel research continues through two international parent-focused organisations of which ACSSO is an active member.
And in Australia, ACSSO and the Australian Parents Council have led and conducted action research since 2002, which directly contributed to the development of the National Framework. This includes pilot work with 61 schools chosen by the parent organisations and funded by the Australian Government in 2005-2006 and still continuing; and our work with some 200 schools from 2003 to 2006 with the “Families Matter” initiative which the parent organisations developed, piloted and validated as an internationally recognised “best practice” approach for building sustainable partnerships – facilitated by parents.
Sadly, despite excellent outcomes, at end of the three-year funding of “Families Matter”, government funding was not renewed beyond 2006 – though there are still some schools running the program internally because it works, and others continue contact us wanting to take it up or build on their earlier positive outcomes…
One barrier to sustainable change has been the endless start-stop approach to funding such school based initiatives, which make schools and parents cynical and disillusioned. The other is the gap between the public rhetoric and practical action in terms of recognising and engaging parents as partners with the school in the learning processes.
In the Adelaide Declaration of 1999 all Ministers recognised parents as the first and continuing educators of their children in partnership with schools through the formal years of schooling. In the recent (December 2009) Melbourne Declaration on the Schooling of Young Australians the core elements are all about the importance of engaging parents and building partnerships which contribute to student engagement and achievement: (http://www.mceetya.edu.au/verve/_resources/National_Declaration_on_the_Educational_Goals_for_Young_Australians.pdf)
While the rhetoric is consistently that parents are the most important and valued stakeholder, we continually struggle to have that reflected in practice; and processes of real consultation are more honoured in the breach than the observance…
And so it is so far in the development of My School: the whole purpose of which we are told is to meet the critical information needs of parents and families. Here above all, you would reasonably assume, is an initiative which will be “for the parents, by the parents and with the parents”. But so far could be rather seen as being “done to the parents…”
n this point, you might find it interesting to read Peter Garrigan’s paper of 8 April 2010: “The great as yet unrealised potential of My School” (http://www.acsso.org.au/garrigan100408.pdf)
Achieving real partnership is a long journey and uphill all the way in reality as opposed to so much fuzzy rhetoric. But a journey we have long been walking, and are totally committed to completing.
Rupert Macgregor