Advancing home–school relations through parent support?

Abstract

The present study explores a local initiative to develop parent support services through the school system. In focus are the discourse on home–school relations and parent support and the interplay between discourse and practical occurrences. Official documents, interviews and notes from municipal meetings and informal conversations were obtained from a local authority during 2009–2013. The results show that the education system is discursively positioned as an important player for the administration and organisation of parent support. All the same, opposing arguments are given precedence in decisions concerning what home–school relations should entail. The study explicates that parent support, when connected to compulsory education, is preferably conceptualised as part of and contingent on the forms and characteristics of home–school relations. Furthermore, it makes evident that the term school is recurrently used as a synonym of teachers. This has implications for both home–school relations and parent support.

Keywords:

• home–school relations
• parent support
• compulsory education
• local authority
• critical discourse analysis

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Swedish National Institute of Public Health. I wish to thank the reviewers for valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.