Question

• What do you think are realistic options when discussing family involvement for the educational success of students?

• What options do you think would be difficult to implement in your local educational setting?

• What type of plan would you propose to overcome any obstacles? • What can you add?

• What are some additional solutions for helping make the connections between families and schools? • What about the demographics of the students how could make that difference?

Answer 1

In recent years, there is a general trend in the education community towards exploring the role of parents? in the education system. Both national and international programmes such as “No Child Left Behind” Act (2001) for the US, and the “Every Child Matters” Green Paper (2003) for the UK have been geared to focus on the development of local initiatives to enhance the dialogue between parents, local communities, and schools.

Parental involvement can be defined as direct effort, provided by the parent, in order to increase educational outcomes of their children. This definition implicitly refers to an education production function, and makes parental involvement one of its arguments. This includes all activities by parents that are intentionally linked to learning. However, another key issue in a discussion on the involvement of the studnet’s Family is to look at the school policies and perspective of the School administration on the level of involvement of parents in the different aspects of the academic and non academic calendar of the school. sociologists have differentiated between home-based activities (e.g. helping children with homework, discussing their children’s experiences at school) and school-based activities (such as communication with the school and participation in school-based activities in the form of parent teacher meetings, school board interactions,etc.).

All in all, any school programme which incorporates a family’s direct involvement in the children ‘s learning career is aimed at securing better educational outcomes for the child. Family involvement is therefore instrumental to achievement and increase the output generated by the school system as an institution which provides a consumer based service to the families to help them achieve their socioeconomic goals.