Whining parents

Another primary school dressing-up day looms. This term it’s the Victorians. Before that it was the Romans, and the Egyptians. My wife and I scrabble around painting cardboard and tying up sheets, sometimes even buying a costume that our nine-year-old won’t find embarrassing. It seems like harmless fun. But dressing-up days, extra homework, pressure on school attendance and the expectation that parents should do more to support their children’s education are taking a toll. You can chart the discontent on the Mumsnet website, where parents complain in their thousands against such demands, particularly from primary schools. One suggested dealing with the dressing-up request on world book day by giving children a day off, and saying they’d gone as the Invisible Man.

Sometimes parents reject school rules out of self-interest. Figures released in June showed 397,851 daily absences in England between September and December 2008—an increase of more than 20,500 in two years largely due to parents taking holidays in term-time, when they are cheaper. But increasingly there is an ethical dimension to parental non-compliance. Tom Hodgkinson, author of The Idle Parent (Hamish Hamilton) makes a virtue of taking his kids for weekday camping breaks. More serious is Kevin Rooney, a parent and a teacher from Hertfordshire, who recently spoke out against the increasingly formalised involvement of parents in homework and other areas of school life. He thinks their time can be better spent with their children on other things: “A parent should be free to parent, and a teacher to teach, but there’s been a real blurring of the line.”

Of course, attempts to reach out to parents are neither new nor entirely unwelcome, and are often pushed by high-achieving schools. Good communication between parents and teachers has long been important, while measuring absenteeism is nothing new. But the past decade has seen such moves pushed forward ever more aggressively by a government enthralled by evidence that parental engagement pushes up academic standards. And busy parents have been caught up in a blur of demands.

The root of this lies in home-school agreements, the contracts between schools and parents first introduced by education secretary David Blunkett in 1998. The idea was fine: schools would give parents more information and support, and in return parents would agree to objectives set by the school, for example on attendance, homework, going to parent evenings, acting on information sent home in letters, supporting school activities, and so on. Implicit in the agreements was the fact that teachers couldn’t do everything needed to help a child learn—a belief supported by the research. But whereas parent-school agreements used to be voluntary, in July schools secretary Ed Balls announced that they will be made compulsory under the education bill to be introduced in the next session of parliament.

To many parents, the tensions caused by increasing school demands add up to only a little light-hearted grumbling. But for poorer parents, or working parents with less time, this is a more serious matter. It’s the imposition of special measures on every parent—no matter the circumstances—that frustrates and angers some parents. Parental engagement is helpful. But the research also shows how important it is not to over-pressurise families who already support their child’s learning in different ways.

A government review by Professor Charles Desforges in 2003 pointed out that it was good parenting in general that had most influence on children’s attainment, not specific measures tied up with schools. He concluded that results might improve if initiatives were targeted at those he calls “working-class pupils.” Elsewhere, a review by Professor Susan Hallam at the Institute of Education found that parents as well as pupils and teachers needed to be involved for homework to have benefit—a good reason to make sure that demands about homework are carefully tailored. Parental involvement can, after all, come in many forms. It may be about providing a stable environment, or intellectual stimulation, or social values, or high aspirations. Yet parents are too often being strong-armed into the same model of engagement, with individual family circumstances, interests, abilities and parenting styles ignored. The result can be alienation, even at good schools.

Other centralised government messages that treat everyone as if they were the same—on health education, for example—have similar disadvantages. Carefully targeted local projects by primary care trusts using “social marketing” techniques have proved effective in combating smoking, binge drinking and poor diet, and getting those with a high risk of diabetes to get screening. Yet the amount invested in such campaigns is tiny compared to the blunderbuss television and billboard campaigns telling us to cut down on booze, eat less salt and cut out the fags—which irritate the moderately-living majority, and are ignored by the minority they are aimed at.

Many parents don’t speak out about their frustration with the one-size-fits-all demands made on them by schools, for fear that they will sound lazy or uncommitted to their children. Instead, they go along reluctantly. The result is that a well-intentioned but clumsily implemented policy risks alienating more than it helps. It is whining parents, not pupils, who are creeping like snails unwillingly to school.