Invisible labour: home–school relations and the front office

Abstract

When school front offices are mentioned in research on schools and their relations with the community, it is often to describe how parents/carers and the public are treated officiously and/or inappropriately. In professional development materials, schools are urged to improve communication, and occasionally directed to consider the practices of the front office staff. Yet when schools send out information to parents/carers, the school office is usually the place to which all queries are directed. However, there is almost no detailed research that looks at what actually happens in this place. In this paper we draw on a small‐scale commissioned research project which began to fill this gap. In seeking to reread our data and push further on analysis, we have come to realize that those who work in school front offices are women whose physical and emotional labour is not only rendered largely invisible in a wide range of literatures relating to home–school relations but is also inadequately recognized through recruitment practices, professional development and remuneration. We suggest that there needs to be further research into the high energy, multitasking, nurturing work that goes on in school front offices.

Notes

1. We have used the term parent/carer throughout. This was the term required by the DfES. We are not entirely convinced that this dual terminology is necessarily a ‘solution’ to inclusion, since it privileges biological and legal definitions of parenting and creates an ‘other’ who also nurtures and takes responsibility, but is somehow lesser. It is a binary which is also culturally difficult in societies where multiple parents are ‘normal’: e.g., Australian Aboriginal communities.

2. This article is a rereading by the first author.