Home-school cooperation at the secondary level in the United Kingdom.

This article discusses findings from the Successful Schools Project, a two-year national project involving 10 secondary schools in England and Wales. The project aimed to identify appropriate strategies for involving parents in their adolescents education. The local authorities involved in the project were Cumbria, Devon, Manchester, London Borough of Newham, Nottinghamshire, Rhondda Cyan Taff, Peterborough and Wakefield.

Background

The skills required to be a good parent have always been complex. Today, however, the basics of providing food, shelter and security for one's offspring have been overlaid by greater expectations and the need for higher parental competencies than ever before. The new United Kingdom (U.K.) government has acknowledged the important influence that parents have on their children, and is exploring ways to harness that influence in order to maximize students' learning. The recent U.K. Government Education White Paper, Excellence in Learning (1997), acknowledges the continuing significance of parents as a major force in raising education standards and addressing issues of student performance. The report notes:

Parents are a child's first and enduring teachers. They play a crucial role in helping their children learn. Family learning is a powerful tool for reaching some of the most disadvantaged in our society. It has the potential to reinforce the role of the family and to change education, helping build strong local communities and widening participation in learning. We want to encourage more effective involvement of family learning in early years and primary education.

The Community Education Development Center (CEDC), a United Kingdom charitable trust committed to broader participation in learning, welcomes the ideas and sentiments expressed in the government's White Paper. CEDC has long championed the role of parents in their children's education, and for close to 20 years has managed projects, provided training and produced publications that have argued the value of meaningful parental involvement in children's learning.

One of CEDC's earliest publications, Raising Standards (Widlake & McLeod, 1982), made the case for parental involvement. One of the publication's key findings was that when parents were encouraged to help, children from less privileged backgrounds were not as likely to fail in school and, in fact, did as well as or better than their middle-class peers. This awareness of the importance of family involvement in children's learning is reflected in CEDC's activities with families and parents. Projects such as Compass, Parents As Co-educators and Today's Child - Tomorrow's Adult have explored various dimensions of family and parent education.

These and other projects helped establish CEDC's strong support of parents' involvement in primary education, but the organization also has long harbored a concern about parents' roles in secondary schools. In 1995, CEDC began the Successful Schools Project with funding obtained from the Halifax Building Society, a U.K. bank, and from a number of local education authorities who shared CEDC's interest in the role of parents in secondary schools and the effects of parental involvement on adolescents' performance.

The Successful Schools Project has broken new ground in exploring the potential for schools, parents and students to work together. It has been successfully implemented in schools in England and Wales. These schools explored approaches for involving families in their adolescents' learning, and in contributing to the life of the school. In the most positive cases, the project has revealed that parental involvement can bring about:

* a rise in students' self-confidence and self-esteem

* practical cooperation between parents and teachers

* improvements in student behavior and attendance

* recognition within the schools of the importance of family involvement

* the inclusion of parents who may have been categorized as hard to reach

* improved communication between school and home

* an increase in professional confidence among teachers in working with parents and families.

Lessons Learned

The Successful Schools Project highlights three elements critical to the development and maintenance of school-family partnerships at the secondary level:

Context. Both the home and school contexts influence the extent and success of parental involvement. Evidence from the U.K. report Stepfamilies suggests that there are almost 80 different permutations of families in the U.K. Families also experience different economic circumstances, with indicators pointing to a widening gap between rich and poor families. The number of single-parent families has increased noticeably over the past 25 years, and families with two working adults has become the norm. Of equal importance is the school context in relation to parental involvement. Specifically, secondary schools in the U.K. do not have a tradition of parental involvement. This absence suggests that few secondary schools perceive involving parents as being part of their role.

It takes visionary leadership to make school contexts more amenable to parental involvement. All of the schools in this project stated that support from senior management was critical. In one case, for example, a deputy head teacher drove the minibus that was used to transport a group of parents to sessions at the school. In another case, a member of the school's senior management led the sessions for parents.

Having qualified leadership in schools is essential for changing existing values and culture. The pervasive resistance among school staff to parental involvement in secondary schools can change only with the active encouragement and support of senior management.

Information. Communicating adequate information in appropriate ways is the second essential factor for parental involvement. Recently, during a BBC radio program, a group of parents from Merseyside, England, were asked about their knowledge of different types of drugs, and whether they felt that they knew as much about narcotics as their children did. The parents claimed that they knew very little about drugs, but nevertheless, they believed they were expected to steer their children away from dangerous substances.

Similar questions could be directed towards parents of secondary school age students about the content of their teens' education. Few would have any meaningful understanding of what their children were doing at school or about the subjects in the curriculum. The complexity of the secondary school curriculum often excludes parents from participating directly in their teens' learning. Consequently, secondary schools need to identify strategies for involving parents and for communicating educators' wishes to have parents involved.

Schools involved in the CEDC Successful Schools Project reported that home visits and telephone conversations were necessary prerequisites for parental participation. Also, schools reported that communication with parents had to be maintained between involvement sessions, when parents actually go to the school to discuss issues that are associated with their own learning needs, or those of their adolescents. Several educators said that it was invaluable to have a staff member involved who was well known within the community or who had a reputation for good relations with parents. The value of involving local people in the project derives from the need to overcome the fear or anxiety some parents may have about becoming involved in school. For some parents, schooling was a very threatening and unhappy experience. These parents need to build confidence before they are likely to participate in school life. This is generally best achieved through contact with someone the parents know or with whom they identify - someone they do not find judgmental.

Nearly all the schools in the Successful Schools Project suggested that written communication alone was inadequate. Among the problems associated with written communication is how it is circulated. Letters sent home with students often never reach their destination. The style of written communication can be too complicated, or too impersonal and patronizing. One parent reported that the salutation on a school letter read, "Dear Parent of Primary School Pupil." Furthermore, the evidence suggests that disadvantaged families may read the letters sent home from school but are rarely motivated by these communications to become more involved in their children's formal education. In certain cases, the written word may not be sufficient if parents have literacy or language difficulties. The evidence from Successful Schools is that word-of-mouth communications have the greatest impact.

Partnerships. It is important that schools neither overload parents with responsibilities nor allocate duties that they cannot be expected to fulfill. The Successful Schools Project showed that partnerships are the most appropriate approach to developing good parenting at the secondary school level. Despite all the attention given to partnerships, most programs are not achieving their full potential. Whether organizations want to work in partnership or not, the fact is that by doing so, they can realize a highly productive form of synergy that cannot be achieved when organizations operate in isolation. Good partnerships not only bring to any situation the skills, knowledge and understanding of several people with a common interest in a student's development, but also generate results that are more than the sum of the individual efforts.

School leaders must recognize that "partnership" sometimes means relinquishing the lead role in an activity and allowing others to assume the position of being first among equals. Good partnerships escape the arguments and jealousies that so often interfere in home-school relations. Secondary schools that want to promote partnerships with parents have to develop an ethos and attitude among school staff that views having other adults around as normal. To work well with parents, secondary school educators need to be informed listeners, supporters, consistent guides, patient advisers, encouragers, and interpreters of issues and experiences.

Conclusion

Although few secondary schools conduct parental involvement initiatives, it is possible to involve parents in their adolescents' education. To do so, however, parental involvement must be adopted as a key aspect of a school's mission. This mission must be reflected in teachers' attitudes and practices. Secondary schools must formulate and develop sensitive, effective means of communication with parents. This will demand considerable effort, because parents of adolescents have little reason to be in school on a regular basis. Educators must recognize that parents, even of secondary school students, are partners in their child's learning. This involvement will not assume the same form as in primary schools, and may require that parents act more as supporters and encouragers than as tutors.

The limited number of parental involvement activities in the United Kingdom are generally issue-based, and focus on concerns that the school perceives it cannot address without parental support. The Successful Schools Project acknowledges the significance of these initiatives, but emphasizes that parental participation could prove beneficial in many other areas. Schools that are ready to develop more extensive partnerships with their students' families may find the following observations useful:

* Parental involvement in secondary schools requires the school's adoption of a mission statement, policy or culture that actively encourages parental involvement, and to demonstrate it through practical initiatives.

* Parental involvement in secondary schools can support specific initiatives, including those associated with school behavior or attendance policies.

* Because of parents' resistance to becoming involved in their teens' secondary schools, it is necessary for schools to adopt inventive and imaginative approaches to communicate with, and engage, parents.

* Pupils with parents involved in the project report that they feel they are being given more attention at home.

* Information provided to parents involved in the project helped them overcome a sense of inadequacy about their teens' education, and allowed them to better understand what their children are doing.

References

United Kingdom Government. (1997). Excellence in schools. Education White Paper. London: The Stationery Office.

United Kingdom. (1994). Stepfamilies. Report to the All Party Parliamentary Group on Parenting and International Year of the Family.

Widlake, P., & McLeod, F. (1982). Raising standards. Coventry: Community Education Development Center, United Kingdom.

Phil Street is Director, Community Education Development Center, Coventry, United Kingdom.