Conceptions of Parental Engagement and the Implications for School Leadership and Policy

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Background: Parental engagement is a vital component of effective education and has repeatedly been linked to improved pupil outcomes. As a result, parental engagement has been enshrined in government policies around the world. Parental engagement is a high-profile issue within English schools and features in the Ofsted inspection framework. Despite the amount of attention parental engagement has received, the term remains poorly defined. It is used to refer to a whole continuum of activities (e.g. parents' evenings, support with homework, parents volunteering in schools, home-school agreements, and parents reading with children at home). Previous research suggests that it is parental engagement with learning in the home - rather than parents' involvement with school - that is associated with increased pupil attainment. At Masters level, I researched how parental engagement was conceptualised by staff and parents at one large primary school in England. Worryingly, only 25% of staff conceptualised parental engagement in relation to parents' relationship with learning in the home. School leaders also appeared to overestimate the impact of school-based activities, at the expense of home- and community- based activities. This suggests that there may be a worrying mismatch in the way that parental engagement is conceptualised by researchers advocating for its efficacy, and how it is conceptualised by school staff devising and implementing parental engagement initiatives. The possibility that this is a widespread problem needs to be investigated because schools in which leaders have misconceptions around parental engagement are likely to disproportionately allocate resources towards ineffective, school-based events aimed at parents' relationships with schools, rather than supporting effective family-centred engagement with learning. My previous case study also highlighted large discrepancies between the barriers perceived by school staff and parents. Nearly half of staff said that the main barrier was parents not caring about their children's education. Meanwhile all parents expressed desire to engage with their children's learning. A better understanding of the beliefs held by parents and staff nationally could help to inform teacher training and address misconceptions so that effective, mutually respectful partnerships can be built.Research Questions:1. How do school leaders define parental engagement?2. What sort of parental engagement do school staff aspire to and what barriers do theyperceive? Are there group differences e.g. by role within school or school type?3. What sort of parental engagement do parents aspire to and what barriers do they report? Are there group differences e.g. by gender, ethnicity or SEND?4. What are the implications for school leaders and educational policy?Approach: Participants Parents and school staff from English primary schools covering a variety of different contexts. Data collection tools Data will be collected from staff and parents using anonymous online questionnaires in order to maximise the number of responses that can be collected and analysed from a large geographic region. The parental survey will be translated into other languages where necessary. Data analysis I will use Goodall and Montgomery's (2014) continuum to codify the parental engagement definitions provided by staff and parents. The continuum describes three levels ranging from level 1 (activity focussed on parental involvement with the school) to level 3 (activity focussed on parental engagement with their child's learning, recognising the agency of parents and the value of activity at home). Analysis will focus on whether there is consensus around the vision for parental engagement in English primary schools and whether school staff are using definitions that match those used by researchers and policy makers.