It was while watching my eldest child mouth nativity songs in an Avengers hoodie and jeans, as all around him shepherds and angels sung, that I first became suspicious about “parental engagement”.
We had supplied the costume; he had just refused to wear it. But none of the other parents knew that. They just saw a boy in a red hoodie at the birth of Christ. And they saw two parents who “clearly” hadn’t read the casting letter, hadn’t read the class Facebook page and hadn’t bothered to pay attention to what was happening in school. They saw two parents who were not engaged with their child’s education.
While the teachers didn’t think that in this case, it’s too easy for both parents and teachers to come to inaccurate conclusions about parental engagement in education. The phrase is an oversimplification. It tries to cover too much and ends up an amorphous beast, subject to the whim of ideology, circumstance and misunderstanding. We can’t easily define it, we are not easily able to see it (though we try through proxies) and, as a result of the former and the latter, we definitely can’t measure it.
Is the base level of engagement getting your child to school on time in the right uniform with the right things in their backpack? Is a parent engaged if they attend every PTA quiz night but not engaged if they miss the phonics workshop? Is a parent engaged if they trust the teachers to do their job and only want to be bothered if there is a problem, or do they have to be scrutinising how the curriculum is sequenced?
We have no idea, really. We are all - teachers and parents alike - stuck in parental engagement purgatory, not knowing whether we are headed up or down.
The pandemic brought this reality to the fore, as our cover feature explores this week. Suddenly, there were so many more ways to be (dis)engaged and it was all recorded in 1s and 0s - digital proof of our (lack of) commitment. We may have had loads more data but we had no more of a clue. And the end result was the same as it always is: most of us thought we had not done enough.
Feelings of inadequacy breed resentment. That’s the great sadness I feel when it comes to parental engagement. Our insistence on bundling together a complex set of emotions, capacities, ideologies, behaviours and proxies and saying, “This is what brings your child success,” makes being a fully “engaged” parent - and, for teachers, fully “engaging” parents - unattainable. As a result, just giving up in helplessness and desperation is understandable.
Of course, the general thrust of the argument - that a parent engaged in some level with their child’s education is positive - is almost certainly right. But for that to have any practical meaning, we need to get away from generalism. We need a more context-specific approach that defines parental engagement on a case-by-case basis.
What do we want from an individual parent when it comes to their individual child? And importantly, why? How far is that request reasonable or manageable? How far is it fair? How might that engagement be built in partnership? What would success look like?
It would need more time. It would need more money. It would need fresh ideas. It would need so much more support from external services. But if we’re serious about making parental engagement a priority, then it’s
the only way we are ever going to make it happen.
@jon_severs
This article originally appeared in the 10 December 2021 issue under the headline “Save us all from the purgatory of (gulp) ‘parental engagement’”
