“The literature suggests that among the non-school factors of school achievement like socioeconomic background, parent’s educational attainment, family structure, ethnicity and parental involvement, it is the latter which is the most strongly connected to attainment.” It has long been known that parental involvement is a powerful tool for enhancing pupil achievement and most schools here and elsewhere try to devise ways of involving parents. (See “Engaging Parents in Raising Achievement: Do Parents know they Matter?” Department for Education, United Kingdom for a detailed discourse.)
Recently, the Ministry of Education initiated a pilot programme that focuses on improving passes at the Caribbean Certificate of Secondary Education (CXC) in English and mathematics. The ministry recognises that parental involvement in its pilot process will be as crucial to its success as it is for learning in general. Education is the most important avenue out of poverty and the principal factor in the making of a self-fulfilling and rounded existence. What better New Year gift can parents give to their children and themselves therefore than promising to become more involved in their children’s education? But to be effective, parental participation needs to be properly conceived and implemented and the following comments are intended to aid the process of involvement.
While improved passes at English and mathematics are important, I do not believe that they should become the central focus of the Ministry of Education. This obviously could not be so for a country in which more than half of the yearly school population of some 18,000 reach adulthood without any meaningful qualifications, only to join the band of those who have already done so and swell the ranks of the functionally illiterate. Politics loves quick fixes and there is no quick fix here, but education policy must be focused on preventing this level of human waste and in parallel making sensible provisions for those who are already out of the system, thus providing all Guyanese with some meaningful way of making a decent living. The Ministry of Education understands this problem and has the basic policy framework for dealing with it: it is the political will that has been missing.
Returning to the central issue, the first thing it will be useful to note is that although I use the terms involvement, participation, engagement, etc interchangeably, in recent conceptualisations, there is a difference between parental involvement and parental engagement and it is claimed that what makes the difference in student achievement is not parental involvement in schooling but their engagement in learning at home. “Involvement with the school may be characterised by responding to phone calls, attendance at parents’ evenings or meetings, responding to reply slips or questionnaires, signing student diaries, membership of parent teacher associations or governing bodies, as well as physical presence in the school as either employee or volunteer. These activities are premised upon parents being reactive to the school rather than proactive.” While such activities may be necessary and useful, the research has indicated that they tend to have little impact on learning.
Parental engagement is not the same as parental involvement and while its precise impact on student achievement is difficult to measure, it is clear that it makes a significant contribution to learning. With engagement, the parents are an essential part of the learning process, an extended part of the pedagogic process and the aspiration of raising achievement can only be fulfilled if parents are both involved in schools and engaged in learning. Parental engagement focuses on parent participation in the child’s learning at home and may include projects devised by the school that involve the parent, the teacher and the child and the parent/teacher relationship as it relates to learning at home.
It has long been known that many factors – social status, parental income and level of education, etc. -influence the levels of student achievement and educational outcomes, and the level of parental engagement is also linked to these factors. Parental expectations of their children also have a strong impact on educational achievements, while supervising their work and helping with home work, activities usually associated with parental involvement, help only marginally. Engagement activities include such “initiatives as ‘good’ parenting in the home, including the provision of a secure and stable environment, intellectual stimulation, parent-child discussion, good models of constructive social and educational values and high aspirations relating to personal fulfilment and good citizenship; contact with schools to share information; participation in school events; participation in the work of the school; and participation in school governance” (Ibid).
When parents are given and have the opportunities, skills and knowledge to help their children, they are more likely to be engaged. So, efforts to introduce engagement can face some formidable barriers, the greatest of which is said to be parental experience of education. Based on their own experience, many parents may see school as a place of failure, conflicts, and as part of a general system against which they and their children need to struggle. This can result in a general reluctance to becoming more than the most minimally involved with the school and its activities.
Another major barrier encountered is where parents lack the social skills to participate in the school. Some lack the confidence, understanding of school structures and culture and may feel intimidated because they do not feel they could communicate properly with teachers and school officials who have gone to colleges and universities. Parents may not understand the meetings, agenda, minutes, etc of the school system. Further, the level of education of some parents may make it difficult for them to keep up with the work of their children even when time to engage is available and time is of particular importance for large families and single parents who must earn a living.
In other words then, to be effective, parental engagement must be a priority of the schools and parents seen as an integral part of the student learning process. Schools need to take care to engage both those parents who want to be engaged and devise strategies to communicate with hard-to-reach parents and develop approaches that are flexible in terms of culture and time.
“Parents are the most important influence outside the school. Long after direct learning from parents in a child’s early years gives way to formal education, parents continue to play a key role in student success and learning. Schools are more effective where there is a stronger connection with parents as part of the learning community. The lives parents lead today means that it is more challenging to secure their engagement in learning. Yet this still remains the factor that can make a significant difference to a child’s educational attainment and life chances” (Ibid).
henryjeffrey@yahoo.com
