Are parents the problem?

And, if so, is government guidance the answer?

I really enjoy listening to the They Behave For Me podcast but am always weeks behind due to the fact that I generally only listen to it when doing exercise or on long journeys. I delude myself that I will do more exercise and therefore catch up. As a result, I only listened to Episode 12 a week or so ago and was struck by Adam Boxer and Amy Forrester returning to the theme of unsupportive parents and the issues that this causes for schools.

The section arose out of a Teacher Tapp survey which showed a worryingly high percentage of teachers choosing not to escalate a behaviour issue because of concern about parent pushback. Adam and Amy discussed how this was a symptom of wider changing attitude of parents to schools and the issues that it causes.

It was summed up as follows:

Adam: Every school, I go to says the same - huge uptick in unsupportive parents.

…..

Amy: The thing is - it’s becoming such a drain on schools nationally and we haven't got an infinite amount of time. And the more parents are unsupportive, the more school time that absorbs. And I like, I often think about some of the time that's spent with some parents and not others. And I think just because of parents behaving and, you know, they're kicking off about something, they're getting more bang for their buck, so to speak, in terms of like taxpayer money. And I think about kids whose parents couldn't give two hoots what happens in schools, who would actually really benefit from some one to one time from a professional.

From my limited experience, what they said here rings true and fits with Teacher Tapp and, for example, this recent NFER survey on issues with teacher retention.

However, I was a bit disappointed by what they thought should be done.

Adam: I think this is a big problem. I think we need, we urgently need some kind of national policy type approach here.

Amy: Yeah

Adam: We need serious communication stuff from central government.

Amy: Yeah

Adam: We need clear guidance about what we can and can't do and how interact with parents.

Is government guidance really the answer to improving how parents interact with school? Essentially, there is a cultural issue that parents don’t have the same respect for schools, their teachers and leadership that they once had.

My initial two thoughts on this are:

1. These kinds of changing attitudes can’t be easily fixed by central government guidance. In fairness, Adam was probably referring more to government guidance helping to give schools some backbone when dealing with difficult parents but I think that is only going to help at the margins.

2. Declining respect for institutions isn’t unique to schools but plays out across the board in our public institutions.¹ Whilst this is an issue for our society, it isn’t wholly negative that people are increasingly willing to question authority (even if it feels that way when you are on the end of it).

So, if there is a major uptick in unsupportive parents and you share my scepticism that government guidance is likely to achieve much, then what is the answer? My particular perspective on this comes from being a parent of school-age children long before I was a teacher and my reading of Citizens by Jon Alexander, I have thought that his framework of “subject, consumer, citizen” is a very useful way for thinking about the history of schools.²

For a long time, schools followed what he calls the “Subject” story. This is the authoritarian model that we might perhaps associate with Victorian schools but actually persisted until relatively recently. School leadership and teachers would say what was happening and parents would largely accept. This didn’t necessarily mean that parents had no input but they would respect the school’s decision and comply. They may not have thought much about them and they may have disagreed with some of the decisions but they would go along with them. There were no school league tables and schools could probably get away with quite mediocre performance without it becoming an issue for them.

As a child growing up in the Thatcher era, I was aware of the Subject story gradually being replaced over time with what Jon Alexander calls the “Consumer” story. So, in education, parents were encouraged to think of themselves as consumers of education (even though it was their children who were actually the consumers). SATs, league tables, academies and free schools were all part of this market-orientated approach which was seen as a way of driving up standards. This is still very much the model today.

This is the story which parents hear and respond to. Consumers are encouraged to focus on their own individual circumstances and getting the best deal for themselves (or in the case of schools, their children). So, I would argue that it is hardly surprising that parents sometime have the “selfishness of my issue is the most important thing” as Amy put it. The Consumer story doesn’t encourage any wider thinking about the community or institution as a whole.

It was a point that Adam himself nailed when discussing Michaela Community School in the previous episode.

[Katherine Birbalsingh’s] a big believer in school choice. She says, well, look, if our school isn't for you, just choose somewhere else. And I'm like, well, that's not really how state infrastructure should actually work. Schools belong to their communities. They belong to the state. They're not just for themselves, to just make up whatever the hell they want. So there's always going to be a limit to that. But more importantly, the child hasn't chosen right. The child has not chosen, their parents have chosen.

The Consumer story simply isn’t the right one for schools and, I would argue, actively encourages unhelpful behaviour from parents. So, how do we get away from it? The answer isn’t to go back to the Subject story - you can’t simply expect parents to go back to the level of passivity of previously (and it wouldn’t be desirable anyway). The answer, Jon Alexander suggests is the “Citizen” story. His brief description:

people who actively shape the world around us, who cultivate meaningful connections to their community and institutions, who can imagine a different and better life, who care and take responsibility, and who create opportunities for others to do the same. Crucially, our institutions must also see people as Citizens, and treat us as such. When they do, everything changes.³

How many of our schools see their parent body in this way? It’s perhaps not surprising that schools focus more on the day to day issues of ensuring that their environments are safe and welcoming and that children are learning what they need to. However, I think we are missing a trick in not investing more in our parent body and seeing them as a source of positive change rather than a problem to be managed. Ultimately, I believe that the vast majority of parents want the best for their child but don’t always understand what that would be in a school context and with the Consumer story in their heads, often think it may mean standing up for their child by challenging the school.

I don’t pretend to have thought deeply about what a “Citizen school” would look like but here are five ideas that come to mind.

1. Actively involving parents in what you are trying to teach their children, especially if it is new and unfamiliar to them. How many parents of primary age school children really understand phonics? Yet we ask the children to read with them every night. As a parent, the school that did this best was the international school in Seoul that my children attended for 3 years. I do not know whether this spontaneously came from leadership or was a response to a parent body that was highly demanding⁴ but I remember attending sessions that the school ran on growth mindset, mental health, the use of interleaving in maths and comparative marking. Most memorably, they ran an “open morning” where parents were invited in to see what their children were doing in class.

2. Linking the school in more closely to the community that it serves. The school where I spent my 2 years as an ECT did a great job at being involved with local community organisations and getting them into school as well. Think about what would really embed a school into the community, giving parents a chance to shape what kind of school their children will be going to.

3. Almost every school has a parent teacher association (PTA) - the name clearly suggests a Citizen approach of linking up the teachers and parents. However, this too often becomes primarily a means to fundraise for the school (and so the Consumer story writ large). Could we revitalise PTAs so they truly become a means of linking parents, teachers and the wider community?

4. Along with unsupportive parents, another common theme among early years teachers is the increase in children joining school but not “school-ready”. There’s a huge mismatch between parents who think their child is ready and the views of teachers. Closing this gap is going to require parents to start appreciating the wider needs of a school rather than their own individual child and, in turn, that means outreach before children start school.

5. Amy’s words about the time dealing with certain parents to the neglect of others really resonated with me. It’s easier said than done but carving time out to see parents proactively (especially those hard to reach /engage) should be a priority for everyone at the start of the school year. Rather than a conversation about what the teacher wants, it’s good to flip it to a conversation about the parent wants for their child that year.

This way of thinking about schools and community also made me realise why I felt uncomfortable about the idea of teeth brushing in schools discussed in the same episode. This just seems to me a continuation of the Consumer story rather than treating parents as Citizens who should (and almost always will) care about their children’s teeth. Even under Labout’s plan, the support would stop at 5 years old so how are we going to support and empower parents to ensure that their children practise good dental hygiene all the way to their teenage years? That’s where money and resources should be going. Ironically, Labour had a better answer back in the Blair years with the Sure Start centres whose positive effects on health and education are still being felt to this day.

1. Institutions — The UK in the World Values Survey - accessed at Kings College London.

2. It is a fascinating read even if I find it more difficult to accept some of his more far-reaching applications of the Citizens idea.

3. Citizens, p.11.

4. Trust me, you don’t know what “pushy parents” are until you have lived in South Korea. The day I brought my children for a settling in day, I saw a mum march across the reception to harangue the head about something she felt was being done wrong.