Parental Involvement in the Curriculum

In a recent issue of "Scottish Headlines" - the Journal of the Headteachers' Association of Scotland, the SPTC Development Manager Judith Gillespie pulled no punches. As usual!

The recent report detailing the succes of the "new" system of phonics used in Clackmannanshire to teach children to read will have left most parents puzzled. What was "new" about using letter-sounds to build up words? That's the system that most of them were taught by, so who was the idiot who had decided to replace it with the less successful "look and say" approach?

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Parents may normally be restricted at school level to fundraising with the PTA or discussing the school development plan on the school board, but most will privately admit that they do these tasks out of a sense of duty, not because that's how they want to be involved in their children's education. They are far more interested in the curriculum. As evidence, I offer the two largest and most volatile meetings I ever attended as a school parent: the first was about the proposals for school boards and the second a meeting to discuss English. The verdict from the first meeting was an overwhelming rejection of boards on the grounds that parents didn't want other parents running their school whilst the focus of the second was a fairly angry demand to know why grammar no longer featured in English teaching. Parent rejected the form of involvement but wanted a say in the content of education. It is therefore ironic that school board legislation specifically denies parents any role in the curriculum.

Of course, parents understood why they shouldn't control the curriculum. Evidence from America, where it is in parents' hands, shows the result can be very biased and restricted. However, parents faced with some oddity - such as the "look and say" approach to reading - often question whether the professionals do a better job. It was therefore with more than a little delight that I accepted an invitation to join the recent curriculum review group. At last, I thought, a chance to have real influence on a matter of considerable interest to most parents.

Anyone who has looked at the members of the review group will have noticed that they were drawn from across the education world, with practitioners from pre-school to university alongside educational thinkers and representatives of business. Members came with similarly diverse approaches, ranging from blue-sky thinking to the severely pragmatic. I was firmly locked into the pragmatic end of the spectrum and even argued that we should drop the concept of "enthusiastic" in favour of "efficient" on the grounds that getting most teenagers to be enthusiastic about anything other than their social life was more or less impossible. However, vision won that day!

As the review got under way, I quickly discovered that this was not to be my opportunity to decide how chldren were taught to read nor to restore grammar to English; it was made clear that we were to draw up a set of principles against which the curriculum would be measured. The danger of working in principles is that they will end up sounding like empty rhetoric, a bit high flown and "apple pie-ish", whilst they can always be implemented in more than one way. For example, who can deny the "enterprise" involved in a drug dealing operation? So, to ensure that our principles were not misapplied, we add a set of values.

But is is also hard to draw up principles in the abstract, without some concept of reality. Members of the group clearly had different realities as their starting point and for me reality is that school has its limits and is there to provide the technical skills and knowledge that cannot be delivered at home. The education of youngsters requires a genuine partnership with each side - home and school - playing different, separate but compatible roles in the joint project. My reality therefore includes subjects and a real (as opposed to a virtual) school. School doesn't and shouldn't do everything but it should offer a wide range of knowledge and skills, which the youngster can either develop or, at the very least, understand exists.

Of course, as a variety of realities contributed to the principles, so the principles can be satisfied by a variety of realities. A truant could be deemed to be enthusiastic and motivated; he/she might also have a sense of physical and emotional well being and is certainly self-reliant and resilient, although I think he/she would probably fail all the criteria for being a responsible citizen. But this somewhat extreme exploration of variety hints at the central theme of flexibility. Principles like this allow schools to develop different realities; even to do the future-equivalent of chucking out a tried and tested method of learning to read in favour of some guru-proposed alternative.

Flexibility is important but it is also challenging. It's one thing to kick against the traces of centrally required systems; it's another suddenly to find yourself accountable for the system. Doubtless anyone who has read this far is busy saying "the theory's all very well, but the exam system and pupils' expectations allow us very little room to move". It's true that it's not possible to spend weeks exploring some interesting area of biology and, in the process, satisfy the new curricular criteria if that topic doesn't feature in the SQA exams. Flexibility is firmly constrained by practical considerations - the exams, the available teachers, the numbers of pupils that have to be accommodated, the school space, the proximity of an FE College and so on. On the other hand there's the problem that parents will over-buy the headlines of "flexibility" and "personalised learning" and demand the impossible in practical terms. I feel a headache coming on!

Mention of parents gets me back to my purposes. Offered the opportunity to write an extended article on a subject of my choice, but aware of an expectation that I would write about parents, it was hard to know where to start. I could have done the standard review of school boards and parents' involvement, but that's not really where most parents are. Parents don't even want to "major" on homework (Executive initiative notwithstanding) although they do like homework because it provides a window on school; it helps them know what their children are doing.

In contrast, during the National Debate, we had a lot of parents say to us that it was nice to discuss real issues, not just fundraising ideas. Doubtless this conjures up images of the average low attendance at a curriculum evening and raises serious questions about my true contact with reality. But parents have been so used to being put in boxes marked "fundraising", "to be consulted on management issues", "only interested in their own child", or "over-demanding" that they too find it hard to get out and engage in meaningful dialogue with the school. However, the new curriculum and the new flexibility will require explanation and discussion of exactly what the opportunities are, of why it's sensible to by-pass exams or to take vocational courses. It will be a challenge to everyone to move parental involvement beyond homework!

Written by Judith Gillespie, SPTC Development Manager in the December 2004 issue of "Scottish Headlines" - the Journal of the Headteachers' Association of Scotland.

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