Schools debate – must do better

May 5, 2009 by matthewtaylor
Filed under: Public policy 

With teachers’ organisations committed to boycotting next year’s SATS for eleven year olds and Gordon Brown making a speech about parent power, schools policy is back in the spotlight. The debate is bound to be emotive. Society will never be perfect and schools are always a likely culprit for perceived social ills. Discussion about how to educate is weighed down by ideological baggage, and, as good traditional teaching is better than weak progressive teaching (and vice versa), there’s enough evidence to reinforce any prejudice.

Teachers may hate SATS but they provide a framework for school accountability and for feedback about a child’s progress and for these reasons parents tend to favour them. A few weeks ago I attacked spurious and reactionary research from the ATL which claimed to prove that parents were becoming more irresponsible and hostile. Today,  Gordon Brown will promise to make it easier for parents to demand action if their children’s school is below par. This is in part an attempt to counter Conservative plans for parents to be able to set up their own state funded schools. 

All in all, a depressingly adversarial picture  is being painted. Yet, what we need is a more ambitious and collaborative relationship between schools and parents.  We know, for example, that parental engagement in their child’s education is the single biggest determinant – more important even than family income – of that child’s success at school. If schools saw parents not as trouble makers or difficult customers but as partners they might take more seriously the slow and difficult process of developing a strong set of mutual expectations and norms to frame that partnership.

Over the coming years of public sector austerity schools face making difficult choices. If parents have been kept at arms length they will make these choices more difficult and controversial. But if parents are genuine partners they are more likely to appreciate the pressures and try to find concrete ways of helping the school to cope.

Some schools are taking parental engagement seriously. They must find the national discourse wholly unhelpful, contrasting the shallow posturing of ministers and teachers’ ‘representatives’ with the patient and subtle work of re framing local relationships.

And, as Labour MPs debate the merits of a wholly publicly owned  Post Office, they might want to reflect on why, in a service as significant to society as schooling, the relationship between public service professionals and the public is such a confused and antagonistic terrain.

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3 Comments on Schools debate – must do better

  1. Joan Keating on Wed, 6th May 2009 12:38 pm

    2. I have had two failed attempts at being a parent governor. In both cases I gave it a couple of years before giving up. As I don’t work I had time to go on the training courses, attend all the meetings, sit on panels and do the various extra bits of research that the school needed on particular issues. When the school were interested in taking on a new reading scheme, for example, I was invited along with the senior management team to visit schools already using the scheme. I even regularly baked cakes for the meetings! But I found there was a brick wall whenever I wanted to challenge some of the school’s policies – the budget for books, for example. In the end I felt that it was a role that was all responsiblities and no power. And while I would concede that I’m possibly not the easiest person in the world to get along with and some of the problems were probably down to me there are, I know, plenty of other people who have found school governance less than useful. The point I am making is that before opening up new routes of influence for parents maybe more should be done to address the problems with the existing ones first.

  2. matthewtaylor on Mon, 11th May 2009 7:29 am

    3. Thanks Joan. I had a very frustrating time as a governor myself. I made myself really unpopular raising questions about the performance of the senior team. Subsequently the team was given such a poor rating by OFSTED that the head resigned on the spot. But, if anything this made me even less popular. One way forward I believe is for the non executive functions of overseeing the management of the school to be separated from the broader need to engage with parents. This means having a strong parents council – as we do at our Academy

  3. Arthur Mark on Fri, 10th Jul 2009 7:21 pm

    4. Bloggers. Please keep in mind that Fellows in other countries may be at a loss in understanding the meanings of terms peculiar to the UK; for instance, what is a school governor or what is OFSTED ? Perhaps we can guess that
    a “governor” is what we call a school board member and
    OFSTED is an accrediting body for schools. Perhaps we
    need a glossary when Google fails us.

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