Storming parents, schools and communicative inaction

Abstract

While recognition of the need to involve parents in the life of the school grows in public policy, anxiety continues at the intervention of ‘the angry parent’. This paper seeks to develop understanding of this communicative action and apply it to a study of parental voice in schools that identified a number of expressions of ‘storming’. The paper argues that these occasions were reactions to events in school and the underlying ‘performative attitude’ of parents in their communications was to seek mutual understanding. The disposition of the school, however, while enabling communicative understanding on some concerns (such as welfare) was less amenable to negotiating agreement on issues it regarded as core professional practice (such as control of the learning and teaching process). Parental cultural capital, nevertheless, could exercise a space of influence.

Notes

School of Education, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK. Email: [email protected]

Plowden, and so on.

New labour policy, recent report of the Inspector of Schools.

‘Aggressive parents’, Times Educational Supplement, 3 May 2002 (Whole School Issue Guide).

The National Association of School Masters/Union of Women Teachers at their Easter Conference, 2 April 2002.

‘Yob parents blamed for class chaos’, Observer, 24 March 2002 (front‐page headline).

Estelle Morris, when Secretary of State for Education, interviewed on GMTV Sunday Programme, 14 July 2002.

See also the work of the intellectual historian, Quentin Skinner (2002).

See the work of Gadamer (1975) and Luce Irigaray (1984, 2002) on the significance of questioning.

See also Raymond Williams (1977) use of ‘structure of feeling’, which describes the assumptions, ideas and values that structure communication between members of a community (cf. Rizvi, 1993; Vincent, 1997).