Editorial

In many parts of the world, the role of parents, and by ‘parent’ we mean mothers, fathers, guardians and carers, involved in their children’s education, has taken on profound significance. This is based on the belief that such involvement is important for the quality and success of the child’s education. The nature of this role can take many forms: from acting as the teachers’ appendage, to a more equitable partnership in which parents can play a democratic and policy forming or influencing role, to a school governance role. The broader involvement of families rather than just the parent is also more recognised now than hitherto but perhaps the most important development within the discourse of home–school relationships is of the diversity and intersectionality of identities of the parents themselves. This recognition is of course variable in different countries and societies depending on socio-political contexts. These are the central issues that we address in this Special Issue with reference to seven articles from the UK, USA (including one that refers to both national contexts) Chile and Australia.

A major shift in the home–school relationship has been influenced by the impact of neo-liberal policies and the marketisation of education. Whilst not all countries have implemented such policies equally, the development of competitiveness and individualism, in some form, is prevalent in most Western, developed countries and some emerging economies. The global competitiveness is promoted by the OECD PISA assessment (Lingard and Sellar 2013) which compares and contrasts countries’ education performance and has the effect of shaming national underperformance. We suggest this trend ties in with growing competitiveness between schools and parents for places in the so-called higher-status schools. Two of the countries where these practices are particularly marked are the USA and the UK and as we see in Leyton and Rojas’ article similar practices are ensuing in Chile. In these countries under the guise of increased ‘school choice’ we have seen a fragmentation of the education systems, fierce competition between the middle classes (Reay, Crozier, and James 2011; Weis, Cipollone, and Jenkins 2014) and in parts of the USA, parental involvement has emerged as an unintended consequence of compensating for cuts in state funding (Posey-Maddox 2014).

Neo-liberal education policies and their implications for competitiveness have also had an unexpected effect in changing or exacerbating the nature of parenting. Whilst not particularly focused on by educationists, sociologists have undertaken research on the nature of parenting in the twenty-first century. Furedi (2001), for example, has identified the risk averse and fearful parent but more significantly others have identified a key parenting feature of what is being called the intensification of parenting discussed by, for example, Vincent and Maxwell (2015) and Hays (1996) and is referred to in this issue by Carol Vincent. Intensification of parenting includes privately paid for extra-curricular and out-of-school activities, private tutoring and exotic holidays.

In this Special Issue we have attempted to bring together papers which challenge the dominant perception of the parent or family in relation to education as White, middle class, heteronormative and homogeneous. In her overview of the changing nature of home–school involvement and relationships in the UK, Carol Vincent challenges the gender neutral term ‘parent’ and discusses both mothers’ and fathers’ engagement in school education. She shows how the neo-liberal market has led to pressures on parents emanating from individualistic competitiveness and the heightened emphasis on wanting the ‘best’ for their children. She discusses parental habitus and how this informs classed practices whilst also criticising the binary positioning of parents into middle class and working class locations which she argues, serves to distort working class parents’ more complex behaviours. Daniel Leyton and Maria Rojas also take up the themes of social class and mothers’ involvement in education and the neo-liberal effect, drawing particularly on the feminist theorists Butler and Berlant. On the one hand, they show how middle class mothers’ actions are detrimental to working class parents and, yet on the other hand, they are themselves oppressed through their ‘cruel passionate attachment’ to the education market.

Recognition is also given in this Special Issue to the increased involvement of fathers. Linn Posey-Maddox’ work in the USA and Derron Wallace’s, in the USA and UK, reinforce this argument providing evidence from their respective studies with Black fathers. In doing so, they address the paucity of research on Black fathers and education and counteract the pervasive negative accusations and connotations of Black fathers as largely absent and uninvolved in their children’s education. As Posey-Maddox says, research and education professionals frequently use examples of the active parent as the White middle class mother. In both of these articles we see a range of involvement by the Black fathers who also represent the spectrum of different social classes. In both articles we see that the fathers engage with their children not simply through the school, attending parent–teacher meetings and events for example but also through support with homework and providing educational activities and so on. Posey-Maddox additionally highlights the role the fathers played in preparing their children, and in particular their adolescent sons, for racist encounters. Both articles clearly show the continual negative experiences that, as parents, they have to navigate whenever meeting with the teacher or visiting the school, what they both call, micro-aggressions. Wallace researches Black fathers in New York and London and reveals teachers’ low expectations of the parents, stereotypes based on ‘race’, class and gender and the positioning of the fathers, in some instances, as Other. However, the positivity and strength of the fathers in Wallace’s work is inspiring and encouraging. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s work, others (e.g. Reay 1998; Symeou 2007) have written extensively on the classed dimensions of home–school relationships and the significance of parents’ habitus in contributing to the educational success of their children. What we see here is something more; on the one hand, we see the power of Whiteness (arguably as a form of capital Reiter 2009) but on the other hand, the fathers through their insights and experience of how ‘race’ and racism operate, they have developed skills, awareness and a sense of resilience to challenge and deal with these forms of discrimination as manifested in the schools.

Arguably, something similar might be said about sexuality and the experiences of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) parents in relation to school. This group of parents is also under researched but is addressed in this issue by papers, all based in the USA, from Abbie E. Goldberg, Kaitlin A. Black, Melissa H. Manley and Reihonna Frost, as well as Andrew Leland. Goldberg and her colleagues compare the experiences of home–school relationships of lesbian, gay and heterosexual couples. They show how sexual orientation and gender intersect to shape their experiences. Leland’s article focuses on a small group of gay fathers who are all White and predominantly middle class. In both of their studies social class plays a significant part in how successful the parents are in forging effective relationships with the teachers and schools and unlike the experiences of the Black fathers, social class does seem to provide advantages for the LGBT parents, overriding to some extent sexual discrimination.

However, what emanates most poignantly from these four papers (by Posey-Maddox, Wallace, Goldberg et al. and Leland) is the extent of the strategies that the parents have to engage in in order to eschew or challenge oppressive and discriminatory practices and attitudes or such potential experiences. Leland clearly explains the lengths some gay fathers go to, including even moving between states to find a school where their child would feel most comfortable and avoid negative and detrimental experiences on account of the parents being gay. Some accounts of insightful and anti-discriminatory practices by the professionals are described in these papers but the variability of these clearly shows that there is still a long way to go. Notably, teachers’ views on parents can impact on parental engagement. How teachers relate to parents also has an impact on the child not only in terms of academic achievement but also emotionally and in relation to respect and social standing.

A further article in this Special Issue addresses the important and often neglected perspective of the school students and their views on the involvement of their parents in their education. These issues are particularly salient for adolescents who are working towards independence and constructing their own identities whilst at the same time being caught in a system that still sees them as children. Sue Nicholls and Garth Stahl address these transitional experiences as the young men in their study, which is located in Australia, move out of their final year of compulsory schooling on to employment or further education. The authors argue for recognition of the importance of the role of the parents at this transitional time.

The articles in the Special Issue demonstrate that the different ways of engagement, the different roles of the parent and the school, need to be reappraised and reconsidered the dominant discourses and policies and practice, not least in the light of school choice and neo-liberal education policies that are increasingly prevalent internationally. The nature of parental engagement in their children’s schooling in the contemporary, global context is discussed not only in terms of the engagement of schools and families in communities and the possibilities for parent/family agency, but also the role of the teachers and the implications of a greater and more equitable role for parents on teachers’ status and power position. By exploring how these changes in parent and family characteristics and structures and their projection of parental/family engagement in school affairs and children’s schooling, this Special Issue has aimed to address how the predominant understanding of parent/family–school relationships are currently changing.