Not your cup of coffee? An ethnographic study on interparental dynamics during parental involvement activities in Dutch primary schools

ABSTRACT

Parental involvement in children’s education contributes to children’s educational success. Most schools, therefore, aim to increase parental involvement and organise school-based activities that provide parents with interaction opportunities with teachers, school administrators, and other parents. Although the impact of parental involvement is studied frequently, little attention has gone into examining the interparental dynamics during school-based parental involvement activities. An ethnographic study conducted in five primary schools in The Netherlands shows how interactions among parents shape school-based parental involvement activities (in specific Parent Coffee Mornings). On the one hand, the interactions during Parent Coffee Mornings contributed to increased parental involvement, parents’ network, and social capital of parents. On the other hand, these interactions created patterns of exclusion among parents in what were intended to be inclusionary activities. Knowledge about the dual nature of these activities is likely vital for researchers and school administrations alike.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnography
• in- and exclusionary practices
• interparental dynamics
• parental involvement
• The Netherlands

Introduction

A large body of research links parental involvement in schooling to children’s academic performance (Domina 2005; Hoover-Dempsey and Sandler 1997). Given the positive associations with children’s educational success, most schools aim to increase parental involvement and organise school-based activities to welcome as many parents as possible into the school. Although its impact is studied frequently, little attention has gone into what happens among parents during school-based parental involvement activities. This is important to scrutinise, to shed light on why some parents participate in school-based parental involvement activities, while others do not. Therefore, the focus of this paper is on how interparental dynamics of parents (when using the term parent, we also include other caregivers such as a family member, friend or a professional who provides care and support for a child) play a role in this.

One of the most common school-based parental involvement initiatives implemented in Dutch primary schools is Parent Coffee Mornings. Parent Coffee Mornings are organised by the schools with the explicit intent of (1) improving communication between schools and parents and (2) increasing parents’ presence at school. Moreover, Parent Coffee Mornings are intended to welcome parents who do not habitually enter the schools. Below is an excerpt from field notes of our ethnographic study that gives a glimpse into how two mothers became involved in a Parent Coffee Morning activity organised by the school.

It is early in the morning, and it is raining heavily as parents wait with their children in the schoolyard for the bell to ring. The bell rings and the children run into the school. A teacher asks parents if they would like to drink a cup of coffee in the coffee room. Two mothers of Turkish descent accept the offer and drink a cup of coffee in the coffee room. Next week, the two mothers come again and bring two other mothers (with Turkish backgrounds) along who have recently moved into the area. A month later, the coffee room is filled with eight mothers of Turkish descent who drink a cup of coffee every week. Meanwhile, these moms are busy decorating the school for the new school theme (each quarter a new theme is central in the school). – Field-notes from School IV, September 2018.

The ethnographic field-notes above highlight two themes: (1) a mother majority among participating parents and (2) ethnic and language connections that have the potential to create opportunities as having the same ethnic and language background helped bringing in more parents, but could also solidify barriers towards other parents. It shows how through existing social networks the almost accidental participation of the first two mothers opened the door for more mothers to participate at the Parent Coffee Mornings. For these mothers, participation in a school-based parental involvement activity not only facilitates their parental involvement in the school, but it also helps them to increase their social network (Warren and Mapp 2011) and social capital (Bourdieu 1986).

Although other parents were also invited by the school to join the Parent Coffee Mornings, they did not participate. In this article, we aim to understand the reasons why some parents participate in school-based parental involvement activities, while others do not, and how interparental dynamics play a role in this. Using ethnographic data carried out in five primary schools in The Netherlands, we scrutinise how interparental dynamics during the Parent Coffee Mornings in Dutch primary schools shape school-based parental involvement. By doing so, we contribute to the growing understanding that parental involvement in children’s education includes networking and interactions between and among parents (Curry and Holter 2019; Levine-Rasky 2009; Li and Fischer 2017; Rangel, Shoji, and Gamoran 2020). We extend previous insights in three ways.

First, we examine whether, to what extent, and for which parents, social resources and involvement are enhanced when schools explicitly provide opportunities for parents to connect with each other. The work by Curry and Holter (2019) revealed that, for parents, contact between parents constitutes involvement. With these findings in mind, the authors underscore the need for schools to provide opportunities for parents to make connections with other parents. Connections with other parents are seen as an important step in building parental networks, which is a form of social capital. This resonates with the findings from the work of Rangel, Shoji, and Gamoran (2020), showing that, without a school-specific focus on building relationships, opportunities to meet other parents were often brief and infrequent and strong school-based relationships may be limited to the most outgoing parents. In the current paper, and building on these insights, we will investigate the parental dynamics when schools explicitly provide opportunities for parents to connect with each other.

In doing so, secondly, we also expand on the work of researchers such as Levine-Rasky (2009), Posey-Maddox, Kimelberg, and Cucchiara (2016), and Horvat, Weininger, and Lareau (2003). These studies, with an explicit focus on middle-class parents or how these parents differ from lower-class parents, have investigated the architecture of parent networks (Horvat, Weininger, and Lareau 2003), and how these networks exercise influence (Levine-Rasky 2009) and what the consequences are of middle-class collective actions to improve city public schools (Posey-Maddox, Kimelberg, and Cucchiara 2016). The current study takes a more inward-looking perspective and analyses the dynamics within these networks. We do not explicitly focus on either higher or lower social class parents, but instead investigate whether and to what extent social class plays a role in these interparental dynamics.

Third, and finally, we situate our study in The Netherlands. All of the above-mentioned studies were conducted in the United States or Canada. School contexts in The Netherlands differ quite strongly from those in the US and Canada. We highlight three features in this: freedom of education, freedom of choice and national parental involvement networks. Firstly, a prominent feature that sets the Dutch school system apart from other countries is its ‘freedom of education’. This implies that apart from public government established schools, religious groups have the right to establish schools and have them funded by the Dutch government (Denessen 2019). Whereas The United States puts heavy emphasis on decentralisation and delineation between public and private schooling options, due to its ‘freedom of education’ The Netherlands has a small number of expensive private schools, approximately 3 percent (Denessen 2019). Secondly, unlike most other countries, in The Netherlands parents are not allocated to a local school when their child reaches school age, because of the ‘freedom of school choice’, another feature of the Dutch school system. This system of school choice however also leads to school segregation as White middle and upper middle-class parents tend to choose schools with lower numbers of minority and at-risk children (Denessen 2019). Thirdly, while lot of work has been done in the United States, where the National Network of Partnership Schools (NNPS) is a good example of an agency providing ways to assist schools in improving parent involvement (see also Denessen, Bakker, and Gierveld 2007), The Netherlands does not have such a national network leaving schools independently working on parental involvement.

Literature review

Parental involvement in children’s education has garnered significant attention from researchers due to the confirmed connection between parental involvement and children’s educational performances (Domina 2005; Hoover-Dempsey and Sandler 1997; Jeynes 2007, 2012). With the intended outcome of improving educational outcomes of children, researchers and educators alike seek to record and understand the various types of parental involvement in children’s education (Alameda-Lawson and Lawson 2019; Brown et al. 2022; Epstein 2018; Williams and Sánchez 2012), parents’ and educators’ perceptions of these types of parental involvement (Berkowitz et al. 2017; Posey-Maddox and Haley-Lock 2020; Williams and Sánchez 2012), and how each type of parental involvement contributes to children’s educational performances (Jeynes 2012). The focus of this paper is on school-based parental involvement, which is defined as parents’ active participation in any school setting, such as through parent-teacher meetings and extracurricular events, as well as providing parents with interaction opportunities with teachers, school administrators, and other parents (Epstein 2018).

Beside the positive aspects of parental involvement as ascribed above, there are downsides as well, in particular for this type of parental involvement. First, the manner in which these parental involvement activities in schools are structured often leads to groups of parents being excluded. For instance, the activities are usually organised in the mornings during workhours which could disproportionally affect certain sub-groups of parents that have little to no flexibility in their working hours, thus rendering it is almost impossible to attend daytime, school-based parental involvement activities (see also Lareau 2000; Allen and White-Smith 2018; Brown et al. 2022; Grant and Zwier 2014; Doucet 2011; Jasis and Ordoñez-Jasis 2012; Lareau 2003; Lightfoot 2004; Reynolds et al. 2015; Turney and Kao 2009; Williams and Sánchez 2013; Wilson and Yull 2016). Doucet (2011), for example, characterises parental involvement activities in schools as a ‘ritual’ that reinforces already existing social structures. Parents who do not fit the school’s gendered, cultural, ethnic, and classed expectations are excluded and viewed suspiciously for behaving improperly, as outsiders, and their attempts to engage are more likely to be seen as a threat to the teacher’s or school’s power (Doucet 2011). In addition, several American researchers have confirmed that, for immigrants, not being able to speak the dominant language, whether it be Chinese-speaking (Ji and Koblinsky 2009) or Spanish-speaking (Abrams and Gibbs 2002; Pavlakis, Conry, and del Rosal 2019), is a key mechanism through which parents are excluded from school-based parental involvement. Moreover, the preponderance of women’s involvement in their children’s schooling is also acknowledged as part of cultural and gender-based expectations of parental involvement, which makes it less appealing for men to participate in these activities (Jasis and Ordoñez-Jasis 2012). Goodall and Montgomery (2014) criticised the limited parental agency with school-based parental involvement activities where the school is in control of the relationships and the flow of information; they concluded that parents may be involved in activities, but those activities are instigated and controlled by the school (ibid). Posey-Maddox and Haley-Lock (2020) too criticised the one-sided perspective on school-based parental involvement where teachers’ conceptions of successful family–school relations – as well as their actual practices – focused largely on the school as the point of departure.

Taken these downsides of school-based parental involvement into account, more recent to the discussion of parental involvement in schools, and inclusion and exclusion practices, are studies that connect parental networks to school-based parental involvement. Parental networks are viewed as social capital, a resource that enhances children’s education for those who can possess this form of capital and a barrier for those who cannot. These resources include goods such as material possessions, information, advice, and support as well as less tangible elements such as norms and trust (Bourdieu 1986; Coleman 1988). In this, schools are key organisations through which parents develop ties (see also Cox, Steinbugler, and Quinn 2021). Parental involvement scholars have begun to look closely at parents’ social networks and community involvement in an effort to examine school-based, parent-to-parent social ties as conduits for information exchange, collective organising, and other valuable resources (Cox, Steinbugler, and Quinn 2021; Li and Fischer 2017; Lareau, Weininger, and Cox 2018; Posey-Maddox, Kimelberg, and Cucchiara 2016). Parents, themselves, recognise the importance of networks and other forms of social capital to feel more informed about, and involved in, their children’s school (Curry and Holter 2019). In line with this, scholars have shown that parents who maintained ties to teachers and other parents, regularly gained access to, and exchanged information about, the school and schooling (Lareau and Muñoz 2012). The work of Useem (1992) showed that mothers who were more integrated in a web of informal parent networks knew more about school tracking policies than less integrated mothers. Finally, scholars have recently discovered that parents perceived their relationships with one another as parental involvement, expanding prior understandings of the meaning of parental involvement and underlining the importance of parental networks (Curry and Holter 2019).

Nevertheless, not all families are embedded in parental networks that provide them with the information and resources to improve their children’s educational performances. Scholars have demonstrated that the quantity, quality, and effectiveness of parent networks for parental involvement differ by social class and run along racial and ethnic lines. The work by Horvat, Weininger, and Lareau (2003), for example, has shown that the networks of middle-class families were populated by working professionals such as lawyers and doctors, while working-class and poor families’ networks were primarily kinship-based. Other studies expose that the social networks of low-income parents do not prominently include other parents at their children’s schools (Lareau and Shumar 1996; Murray et al. 2014), which limits parents’ ability to learn about the school or their children’s educational process via their social networks. Furthermore, groups of parents may also intentionally create barriers for other parents’ involvement. The work of Hernández (2019), reports that White middle-class families attending racially diverse schools often will rely upon their ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu 1986) as a response or reaction to establish their racial identity within those schools. By employing their disproportional social capital, these parents aim to change the ‘ethos’ of those schools. Thus, leading to the marginalisation of the other social and racial/ethnic groups coexisting in those schools. Similarly, the study by Levine-Rasky (2009) presented how active involvement in the school by White middle-class parents not only led to further alienation between these parents and immigrant parents at the school, but also actively led to the exclusion of new groups of parents from school-based parental involvement activities.

Hence, relationships among parents are a vital part of the discussion on which aspects might facilitate or hinder school-based parental involvement. When investigating school-based parental involvement activities, however, most scholars do not focus on the interparental dynamics during these activities. Elaborating on the few studies that do include relationships among parents, we also add a new Dutch perspective. Our ethnographic study, conducted within five primary schools, is situated in deprived neighbourhoods in the city of Rotterdam, The Netherlands. It uses the setting of Parent Coffee Morning to assess interactions amongst parents and to investigate how interparental dynamics may facilitate or hinder parental involvement. We assert that an understanding of interparental dynamics during school-based parental involvement activities in The Netherlands – both in terms of the valuable voluntary contributions that ‘involved’ parents make to schools, and in terms of the power they hold to include and exclude other parents – is vital for parental involvement researchers and for school personnel who seek to build effective paths toward increasing overall parental involvement.

Methods

Setting

The study is part of a larger mixed-method research project on parental involvement both in the school and at home in deprived neighbourhoods in the city of Rotterdam (Gemeente Rotterdam 2018). Within the larger research project, another study focused on home-based parental involvement by investigating the impact of the Dutch family-oriented Collaborative Learning intervention (Keizer et al. 2022). The Collaborative Learning intervention was developed by Frontlijn, an organisation constituted by the municipality of Rotterdam. The Collaborative Learning intervention aimed to support lower SES and migrant families in deprived neighbourhoods in Rotterdam through partnerships with schools. Thus, in contrast to the current study, the other study focused on parental involvement at home rather than at school. That study was situated in the same schools as the current study. Characteristics of the five primary schools included in the current study can be found in Table 1.

Table 1. Overview of the five participating schools in our study.

Schools	I	II	III	IV	V
Number of students	160	350	340	245	500
Special Needs Students	34%	4%	20%	18%	32%
Estimated education background parents^a	Low^b	Middle-High	Low-Middle	Low	Low-Middle
Estimated number of migration background parents^c	80–90%	20–25%	70%	80–85%	50–55%
Dominant birth Language of parents	Arabic	Dutch	Dutch	Turkish	Dutch
Religious Affiliation	None	Protestant-Christian	Catholic	Protestant-Christian	Catholic
Parents Coffee Mornings	Weekly	Twice a year	Weekly	Weekly	Weekly
Parental Involvement Worker	Fulltime	None	Part-time	Part-time	Fulltime
Number of mothers participated in our study	10	7	10	9	14
Number of fathers participated in our study (fathers interviewed)	4 (4)	4 (0)	4 (2)	4 (4)	6 (3)

^a There are no official numbers on the education background of the families on school level, these are estimated averages by the schools themselves.

^b Low educated is a combination of Primary Education and Lower Secondary (vocational),Middle educated is a combination of Upper Secondary (vocational) Education (in Dutch context known as a basic qualification), and Upper secondary (vocational) education, and High educated is a bachelor’s degree or higher. See also: https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/nieuws/2019/33/verschil-levensverwachting-hoog-en-laagopgeleid-groeit/opleidingsniveau

^c There are no official numbers on the migration background of the families on school level, these are estimated averages by the schools themselves.

For this paper, we used ethnographic data collected during Parent Coffee Morning activities in the five primary schools mentioned above. Despite the ‘freedom of choice’ for parents, the vast majority of the students attending these schools, also lived within walking distance of the school in which the selected schools represent the neighbourhoods. Due to its ‘freedom of education’ on average, seven out of ten students in Dutch primary and secondary education attend a state-funded school with a religious affiliation (CBS 2017). Lastly, four out of the five selected schools offered weekly Parent Coffee Morning activities, and one offered Parent Coffee Mornings twice a year.

Parent coffee mornings

In The Netherlands, as abovementioned, there is no national network for schools on partnerships, such as the US National Network of Partnership Schools, leaving schools independently working on parental involvement. Nevertheless, Parent Coffee Mornings are a common school-based parental involvement activity at primary schools in The Netherlands and are our primary site of our ethnographic data collection. In school year 2018–2019, out of the 172 primary schools in Rotterdam, 133 of them held weekly Parent Coffee Mornings (Gemeente Rotterdam 2018). As stated before, Parent Coffee Mornings are organised by schools with the explicit intent of (1) improving communication between schools and parents and (2) increasing parent presence at school. These mornings are designed to welcome parents who do not habitually enter the schools. During these gatherings, a room is reserved in the school, usually the staff room, where parents are welcomed with coffee, tea, and biscuits by the Parental Involvement Worker (PIW) or another member of the school staff. Most schools occasionally select a theme for these meetings (e.g. communication, education in the coming years, etc.), which parents could then learn about and discuss during the meetings. According to the schools, these Parent Coffee Mornings are important sources of information for the schools to receive feedback about school policy. Sometimes the schools invite professionals such as the school nurse, the school’s social worker, a local police officer, the local dentist, etc. to provide more general information on parenting, health care, and the neighbourhood to parents. Yet, most of the time, the parental involvement worker or another member of the school staff welcomes parents and provides parents with the latest information on the school after which parents could ask questions to the school staff, and then parents are free to chat with each other over coffee and tea in order to facilitate parent-parent contacts.

Data collection

Ethnographic data were collected by the first author to understand the inner-workings of Parent Coffee Mornings as a site of school-based parental involvement by examining interparental dynamics during these activities. Over the course of the school year of 2018–2019, the first author participated, observed, and documented the Parent Coffee Morning activities at the five selected primary schools. Access to the schools was obtained through the partnership of the Collaborative Learning intervention. All five schools also agreed to participate in our ethnographic study. As the intervention had no role in the school-based parental involvement activities or in the Parental Coffee Morning activities, we were able to function independently from the larger study. We selected the Parent Coffee Morning activities as main site of study, as this was the most common and accessible school-based parental involvement activity in The Netherlands. These activities were usually run by the Parental Involvement Worker (PIW) or another member of the school staff. All attendees of the Parent Coffee Mornings were asked to participate in the ethnographic study, and they agreed to do so. The first author participated and observed on a weekly basis in the Parent Coffee Morning activities at the schools. These participant observations allowed us to gain a better understanding of parent interactions within each school. During each activity, the first author introduced herself as a researcher studying school-based parental involvement. Yet often, the researcher was seen as ‘one of the parents’ by the other parents, which was apparent from the way they addressed the researcher.

In the beginning of 2019, within each of these schools, focus groups were conducted, with sizes of focus groups ranging from four to twelve parents, with a total of 59 participants. This was a mixture of recurrent attendees of Parent Coffee Morning activities and other parents with a child in the first four years of primary school (age 4–9) of which the first two years are comparable with kindergarten. This was the focus of the larger research project. As it appeared that the foremost attendees of both the Parent Coffee Mornings as well as the focus groups were mothers, separate semi-structured interviews with thirteen fathers were conducted to understand their perspectives on the Parent Coffee Mornings and their involvement with their child’s schooling in general. At the request of the participants, the interviews were held in the early evening at the homes of the respondents in the spring and summer of 2019. The combination of participant observations, focus groups, and interviews about the same phenomenon enabled us to obtain a better understanding of the meaning behind the actions and behaviours of parents. A semi-structured interview protocol which included the main topics of school-based parental involvement and interparental dynamics at school, was used for each interview and focus group. Focus groups lasted approximately one hour and interviews between forty minutes and ninety minutes, and all interviews and focus groups were recorded with the signed permission of parents attending. The recordings were transcribed, and quotes translated from Dutch to English.

Research participants and the socio-cultural context of The Netherlands

The main research participants were seventy-two lower SES Dutch families (fifty mothers and twenty-two fathers) of whom all had at least one child (age 4–9) in the selected primary schools in deprived neighbourhoods in Rotterdam (see Table 1). In addition, we informally spoke with school personnel of each selected school about the goals, intention, and elaboration of Parent Coffee Mornings. The focus was on schools in Rotterdam, because the intervention, which effectiveness was under scrutiny in the other study within the larger research project, was mainly carried out in several schools in that city. Our focus on lower SES families instead of middle or upper-middle class families, followed from the schools’ (and neighbourhoods’) composition in which the vast majority had lower SES backgrounds.

The next paragraph will provide more information on the wider socio-cultural contexts of The Netherlands in which our main research participants were located. In 2022, 25.8 percent of the Dutch population had a migration background (CBS 2022). This included people who were born abroad (the first generation), as well as those who were born in The Netherlands and of whom at least one parent was an immigrant (the second generation). From the third generation onwards, individuals are no longer registered as having a migration background and are thus considered Dutch. The largest group of people with a migration background in The Netherlands came from Turkey, followed by Morocco, the former colonies of Surinam and Indonesia, neighbouring country Germany and fellow EU member state Poland. Individuals and families with a migration background overwhelmingly live in the larger cities in The Netherlands. For example, in Amsterdam, The Hague, and Rotterdam more than half of the residents have a migration background. In the Rotterdam neighbourhoods where our study was situated, between 65–80 percent of the individuals had a migration background.

Regarding the education level in The Netherlands, in 2020 31 percent had a Bachelor’s degree or higher (Gemeente Rotterdam 2021). In the neighbourhoods we studied this was only 19 percent. On average 41 percent of the people in the neighbourhoods under study were lower educated¹ compared to 28 percent in The Netherlands as a whole. The vast majority of our main research participants (60 out of 72) was lower educated, of whom 45 had an International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) level 2 education and fifteen had an ISCED level 3.² In addition, the people in the neighbourhoods we studied had a relatively low household income; on average 19,000 euros gross per year which is half of the average income in the Netherlands, 38,000 euros (Gemeente Rotterdam 2021).

The languages most frequently spoken in The Netherlands are Dutch (official language), Limburg’s (regional language), Frisian (official language in the province of Friesland), varieties of Turkish, Arabic, Tamazight/Berber and Cantonese. In neighbourhoods with many people with a migration background and in the provinces of Limburg and Friesland, social services such as the pharmacy, the municipality and the neighbourhood supermarket are often also offered in Turkish, Arabic, Cantonese, Limburg’s and/or Frisian. The main language of instruction in Dutch primary schools is Dutch.³

Data analysis

Data for this article were analyzed by the first author applying a classic qualitative thematic analysis framework using NVivo 12 for Mac. Thematic analysis provided a good resource for unifying the data into meaningful, overarching ideas, in which we used a combination of within and across school variations. Themes were developed both from the data (interparental dynamics) and from our theoretical understanding of the phenomenon under study (school-based parental involvement). Elaborating on Ryan and Bernard (2003) we followed the steps of (1) discovering themes (2) deciding which themes are important based on the frequency in the data (3) building hierarchies of themes also based on the frequency in the data, and (4) linking themes into theoretical models of school-based parental involvement and interparental dynamics. In this, we focus on three themes that we have identified as key themes of exclusion practices among parents: gender (‘women don’t want us men there’), language (speak your language), and parent cliques. These themes represent the most consistent patterns that we found in the data. Each of those patterns was illustrated using representative fragments and citations.

Findings

Through three ethnographic themes ‘women don’t want us men here’; ‘speak your language’; and ‘parent cliques’ we examine in detail how interparental dynamics shape parental involvement activities. The field-notes in the beginning of the paper illustrate how up to eight mothers become involved in a Parent Coffee Morning activity organised by School IV. The attendees of this school-based parental involvement activity have become a frequently attending group of parents, all mothers of Turkish descent. Although the school is much more diverse in terms of ethnic and gender composition, these Parent Coffee Mornings remain unilaterally composed. And these mothers were fine with that. ‘In this way, we can have open and honest conversations with each other about our children’s schooling’, says mother 7 of School IV. Drawing on Bourdieu’s (1986) conceptualisation of social relations as a form of social capital, these mothers benefit from the Parent Coffee Mornings by building new relationships with each other and the school administrators. Moreover, the school also benefitted from the presence of these mothers as they needed parent volunteers to properly function. Generally, Dutch schools expect that parents will volunteer to help with classroom activities, field trips, and more. Without this school-based parental involvement, it is likely that school activities would have to be limited. These and other ethnographic participant observations will be linked to the main themes in the finding paragraphs below.

‘Women don’t want us men there’

The vast majority of parents participating in school-based parental involvement activities, and especially Parent Coffee Mornings, were mothers. Over a period of one school year, we participated and observed Parent Coffee Morning activities at these five primary schools in Rotterdam, and recorded which parents were present during these activities and how they interacted with each other. Our participant observations showed that the overwhelming majority of participants were mothers. School I held weekly Parent Coffee Mornings with an average of eight to fourteen parents attending, but not a single father attended over the course of the school year. The same goes for School IV: between six to eight mothers and no fathers were present at the Parent Coffee Mornings activities. On average, at Schools III and V, between six to sixteen parents participated in the Parent Coffee Mornings, including two to three fathers. In School II, there were six to eight parents attending, of whom three to four were fathers. Similar to other studies, our participant observations indicated, that the majority of Parent Coffee Mornings activities were attended by female parents and usually organised by female school staff, with the exception of School II.

This gender disbalance was not only present in our study, but also in the dominant understanding of parental involvement: often, fathers are overlooked and captured in the aggregate measure of ‘parental involvement’ representing fathers and mothers together but reported by mothers only in practice (Lareau 2000; Posey-Maddox 2017). In many cases, models of parent engagement remain ‘gender-neutral’ and do not fully acknowledge the unique aspects of spaces that have historically been led by women (Cooper 2009). Hoover-Dempsey and Sandler (1995) for example, raised this point in their model of parent engagement, and clarified that ‘parents’ refer to both fathers and mothers, although academics often just examine mothers.

Our findings showed that interparental dynamics in the form of the gender disbalance of the participants in the Parent Coffee Mornings created both an intentional and an unintentional effect that mothers held the power to include and exclude other parents, in particular fathers. In the focus group with parents of School I the participating mothers elaborated on why there are no fathers attending the Parent Coffee Morning activities at their school.

Interviewer: where are the fathers?

Mothers 9, 10, 4 and 6 of School I: My husband is at work

Mother 1 of School I: I’m divorced

Mothers 7 and 2 of School I: He’s at home

Mother 5 of School I: I told him not to come.

Mothers 8 and 3 of School I: me too.

In line with observations from previous studies (Lareau 2000; Allen and White-Smith 2018; Brown et al. 2022; Grant and Zwier 2014; Doucet 2011; Jasis and Ordoñez-Jasis 2012; Lareau 2003; Lightfoot 2004; Reynolds et al. 2015; Turney and Kao 2009; Williams and Sánchez 2013; Wilson and Yull 2016), the majority of the fathers in our study were at work during the Parent Coffee Morning activities. However, fathers who had the opportunity to attend a school-based parental activity, were either told by some of the mothers not to come (see the focus group of School I), or the gender disbalance of the activity made the fathers not feel welcome to join. For this, we observed three times at School I and School IV that a father wanted to enter the Parent Coffee Morning activity, saw that there were only mothers attending, and then hastily left the room without having had a cup of coffee. When one of the fathers was asked why he left the room, father 2 of School I replied: ‘No, no, I'm not going there [referring to Parent Coffee Morning activity]. I only see women sitting over there’. Hence, both the interparental dynamics (i.e. gender disbalance in the group composition) of the participants in the Parent Coffee Mornings and the exclusion practices by some of the mothers outside these school-based activities resulted in less participation of fathers.

Gender intersected with race and ethnicity

In general, the preponderance of women’s involvement in their children’s schooling made it less appealing for men to participate in these activities (see also Jasis and Ordoñez-Jasis 2012). For example, a White Dutch father [2 of School III] laughed when a teacher invited him to join the Parent Coffee Morning activity: ‘No, thanks, I don’t like a chicken coop’, while two other fathers were present. Of the few men (nine in total) who attended Parent Coffee Mornings activities six were White Dutch fathers (School II, School III and School V) and three fathers had a migration background of Surinam and Curaçao (School III and School V). Posey-Maddox’s (2017) investigations of Black fathers’ engagement and family-school relationships highlighted the importance of understanding the intersections of race, class, gender, and place in studies of parents’ engagement. In our study, parental ethnicity played an important role among the Arabic and Turkish-speaking parents in terms of father absence. It was noticeable that in the schools where the majority of the students and their parents were Arabic-speaking (School I) and Turkish-speaking (School IV), fathers were completely absent during the Parent Coffee Mornings activities. In the interviews, Arabic and Turkish-speaking fathers specified that gender imbalance was an essential reason for them not to attend Parent Coffee Mornings activities. Father 3 of School I described this as followed: ‘A female teacher with only mothers in one room, I cannot join them. [Interviewer: why?] It’s just not done!’ In the interviews, the Arabic and Turkish-speaking fathers also said that their partners asked them not to come to the Parent Coffee Mornings, as women did not want to have men present at the Parent Coffee Mornings. ‘My wife often goes to these free coffee events at school. When I ask if I can come too, she says no, this is a women’s thing’. – father 4 of School IV. ‘The teacher asked me if I came in for a cup of coffee the next morning. I told my wife, but she says no I can’t come, that is not for fathers, but for mothers’. – father 1 of School I. ‘Women don’t want us men there’. – father’s 2 and 3 of School IV. In this way, mothers created, in both unintentional (gender balance) and intentional (women don’t want us men there) ways, additional barriers for fathers to become (more) involved. This was even stronger for Arabic and Turkish-speaking parents.

Speak your language

Several studies have indicated the importance of language for parental inclusion and exclusion during school-based parental involvement activities (Ji and Koblinsky 2009; Abrams and Gibbs 2002; Pavlakis, Conry, and del Rosal 2019). In our study, language played a crucial role in the interparental dynamics during the Parent Coffee morning activities. In two of the five schools in our study, the majority of students’ and parents’ first language is non-Dutch: Arabic in School I and Turkish in School IV were the dominant languages. Especially in these two schools, language was an interesting and recurring theme: language was used to create both inclusion by the school administration and exclusion among the participating mothers. The excerpt from field notes below exemplifies in detail how this unfolds in School I during the weekly Parent Coffee Mornings.

After parents dropped off their children in the classrooms, the mothers make their way to the ‘parent’s room’, while the fathers leave the school building. Nancy, a White Dutch parental involvement worker warmly welcomes the parents in the room. In this ‘parent’s room’ are a coffee maker, kettle, microwave, dishwasher, table fridge and a large oval table in the middle surrounded by fourteen chairs. This is the same room where school staff take their breaks. At exactly 08h30 Nancy opens the Parent Coffee Morning and shares the latest updates on the school news in the Dutch language. Sonia, a young mother from Syria, does not speak Dutch yet, therefore Nancy asks Karima, a mother with a Moroccan background, who is also a volunteer at the school, to translate for them. Nancy calls Karima her personal translator. ‘Of course, I will, as always’, says Karima friendly, ‘that’s what I am for.’ Karima translates Nancy’s latest updates word by word. Sometimes, Karima has to think how to translate some of the Dutch words to Arabic and she immediately receives help from other Dutch-Arabic speaking mothers. After a few minutes, Nancy closes off this formal part of the Parent Coffee Morning and invites mothers to stay and informally talk to each other. The parental involvement worker walks out the room and leaves the mothers alone. Karima continues her story about how some words are ‘so difficult to translate into Arabic’. The Dutch-Arabic speaking mothers who participated enthusiastically with her in this, confirm this. A lively conversation about translation arises among the largest group in the room, the Dutch-Arabic speaking mothers, a total of eight women with various ethnic backgrounds. Their conversation takes place half in Dutch and half in Arabic, even within a sentence the language is effortlessly changing. This makes the conversation difficult to follow for the other six mothers, who do not speak Arabic. When two parents with Dutch Antilles background ask the Dutch-Arabic speaking mothers a few times whether it would be possible to speak in Dutch, there was little to no response. To counteract, the Dutch-Antillean mothers started speaking in their birth language, Papiamentu. This resulted in the remaining four White Dutch mothers being excluded as they can neither follow conversations in Arabic nor in Papiamentu. They try to make eye contact with each other and sigh hard and repeatedly. Karima sees this happening in the corner of her eye, apologizes several times during her conversation: ‘I’m sorry, but this has to be in my own language, you don’t mind, do you?’ ‘Well actually I do’, says Michelle one of the White Dutch mothers so softly that it is not meant to be heard. It is no longer about translating certain words. Visibly frustrated, one White Dutch mother after another leaves the Parent Coffee Morning early. Field-notes from School I, February 2019.

The above excerpt from field notes illustrates how the desire and implementation of inclusion by the school administration promotes interparental dynamics that form exclusionary practices among parents. The parental involvement worker asked a Dutch-Arabic speaking mother to translate her information to a non-Dutch speaking mother, in which non-Dutch language communication was not only accepted, but also encouraged during the school-based parental involvement activities. However, the Dutch-Arabic speaking mothers continued to speak in their native language after the official part of the meeting was over. This example illuminates how an unintentional form of interparental dynamics changed to an intentional practice thus resulting in exclusionary practices. The majority of the group (at this school the Arabic-speaking parents) decided intentionally to continue to speak in a language that not everybody in the Parental Coffee Morning activity understood, and thus resulting in the exclusion of other parents. Speaking in one’s native language makes communication easier among in-group members and can create a strong sense of belonging among members (Hedegard 2018). At the same time, it can create barriers for other parents. According to Hedegard (ibid) a shared non-dominant language, such as Arabic language in a Dutch school, is part of cultural knowledge that allows actors to maintain group bonds and boundaries. This cultural knowledge is very useful as it can be transformed into cultural resources and social capital that may help with access to information, support, and other resources, especially for weak ties such as acquaintances and fellow parents at school. Although the official language of instruction at the school is Dutch, the nature of the student and parent population has led the Arabic language to become an important medium of communication as well: informal exchanges of information among parents often took place in Arabic. As a result, Arabic became a significant language for gaining social capital at this school. Here, the Dutch case is different than in previous studies in which several American researchers confirmed that immigrants were excluded from school-based parental involvement due to their limited ability of speaking the dominant language (see also Ji and Koblinsky 2009; Abrams and Gibbs 2002; Pavlakis, Conry, and del Rosal 2019).

That said, speaking in one’s native language, in this case Arabic, excluded out-group members through the construction of linguistic boundaries around the group. As such, Parent Coffee Mornings activities in School I did provide a social network among participating parents, but solely to those parents who share the same native language.

Parent cliques

Perhaps the most pervasive, and as yet under-researched, interparental dynamic was the development of parent cliques. In each school, there was a group of parents who participated in every event and every committee that existed at the school. These were active parents, mostly mothers, who not only attended all Parent Coffee Morning activities, but who were also volunteers at the schools, co-organised school holiday events, attended extracurricular events and helped as chaperones on field trips. As a natural consequence of their voluntary contribution in the schools, they gained access to information on, and influence in, the schools. This power sometimes came with an official role such as member of a parent council, member of a participation council, member of the parent-teachers organisation or parent representative. But also, this power was apparent in informal ways, such as being known in the school by other parents, teachers, and school administration and by always being kept up to date on the latest news. This formal, and in particular informal, influence empowered and informed these parents as they received first-hand accounts of the operation of the school. One of these parents described this as follows: ‘the school keeps us informed every week, the lines are short, and they ask you for your input. Contributions from us therefore seem important’. – father 1 of School III.

These small groups of parents had strong social ties, and we labelled them ‘parent cliques’. Our data revealed that due to the interparental dynamics present in these parent cliques, it was often difficult for new parents to join the Parent Coffee Morning activities. The existence of these parental cliques formed a strong exclusionary practice towards non-clique parents. In other words, new or other parents participated less in school-based parental involvement activities. As a result, non-clique parents missed out on information exchange, decision-making power, and networking among each other.

‘They must fit in’

‘They must fit in’ is a quote made by mother 4, one of the clique parents of School V and illustrates how this parent clique uses strong exclusionary practice towards non-clique parents. At this school, it is openly known that this parent clique controls which parents would be invited to the Parent Coffee Mornings. The following conversation is part of a focus group, which consisted of a mixed group of parents. This part is by and about the parent clique of School V.

Interviewer: Who comes to these Parent Coffee Mornings?

Mother 5 of School V: Always the same people.

Father 3 of School V: No new ones.

Father 2 of School V: Well very occasionally there are new ones.

Mother 4 of School V: But they must fit in, you know.

Interviewer: What do you mean by that?

Mother12 of School V: They shouldn’t be afraid to talk.

Mother 6 of School V: They need to be themselves.

Mother 3 of School V: We have had people who were too eager to be part of it [parent clique], and they always thanked us for it [followed by a deep sigh].

Mother 4 of School V: Or they respond to every single thing in the group app.

Mother 5 of School V: They are just too willing you know. That’s not chill.

The parent clique in School V used rather vague descriptions such as ‘they must fit in’, ‘they shouldn’t be afraid to talk’ and ‘they need to be themselves’ to control which parent would be accepted at the Parent Coffee Mornings by their standards. In our data, these forms of exclusionary practices went beyond racial, ethnic, social class, and gender lines. Quinn, Cox, and Steinbugler (2020), too, found that mothers’ school-based participation goes beyond their race or class-based social position and is more associated with resource access and mobilisation. Continuing with the focus group, we asked the parent clique, whose members made up part of the focus group, if they would invite new people to come to the Parent Coffee Mornings activities:

Mother 4 of School V: I must be honest and say that we are quite a cohesive group.

Mother 12 of School V: We can also have serious debates during the Parent Coffee mornings, so that might be a bit daunting for a parent who doesn't know anyone yet.

Mother 6 of School V: But yes, we are open for new people as well.

Mother 5 of School V: Only, they have to wait until we have finished a discussion or something.

Father 3 of School V: That is the [anonymized neighbourhood] mentality and you have to be able to deal with that.

The focus group conversations with a mixed group of parents, including the parent clique of School V, indicated that this parent clique was also open to new parents, who may become part of this parent clique as well, if the clique allowed it. The parent clique of this school consisted of parents with strong social ties and who consider each other as friends. They started off with eight parents, of whom two were fathers, one White Dutch father who joined his female White Dutch partner and one single father with a Suriname background, and six mothers of whom two were White Dutch, two had an Asian background (Chinese and Indonesia) and two mothers also had a Surinamese background. The six mothers had part-time jobs and the two fathers worked fulltime in shifts. They classified themselves as ‘typical Rotterdam working-class people’ [mother 3, 4, 5, 12 and father 1, 3 of School V]. Hence, this was a mixed group of parents who found ways to bond together while also bridging differences across race, gender, and language in the same school community (Syeed 2018). The parent clique of School V had a shared history as they have attended the same primary education school themselves and now their children this school. Since their children went to this school, they have re-found each other by participating in school-based parental involvement activities. These activities provided parents with the ability to access and mobilise social ties by forming a parent clique. Their social ties, once established, may then influence greater rates of participation (Quinn, Cox, and Steinbugler 2020). This kind of mutually reinforcing relationship was especially likely in a school environment where parents develop relationships with each other over multiple school years. This parent clique in School V, which began with eight members, extended to twelve members. On average, a Parent Coffee Morning at this school was attended by between six to sixteen parents, whereby parent cliques were always in the vast majority. For the parent clique of School V, it was important to build social relationships with each other for both sociability reasons and to benefit from the specialised knowledge of other parents in order to build relationships with administrators and educators in positions of influence (Warren and Mapp 2011).

Neighbourhood connections

The parent cliques of School I and School IV knew each other from the community centre in their neighbourhoods. In this way, the neighbourhood and the school were inextricably connected to each other. Primary schools in The Netherlands are often located within walking distance of where families live. As a result, families meet each other outside the school as well on a regular basis; for example, in the supermarket, at the playground, at the shopping mall, etc. These interactions in the neighbourhood influence the connections that parents have with each other at the schools. The parent clique at School IV involved parents with strong social ties and consisted of a group of eight mothers with a Turkish background, whom we met during the participant observation in the introduction. These mothers also encountered each other during the Dutch language classes taught at the neighbourhood’s community centre. Mother 2 of School IV tells us: ‘Well, actually, we know each other from the community centre, not from the school. They told me about drinking coffee for free in the school. ‘Yes, I’ve heard about it before, but didn’t dare to go alone’. Curry and Holter (2019) suggest that contact between parents may not merely be a way to enhance parental involvement, contact between parents is parental involvement (Curry and Holter 2019). This was the case for the parent clique at School IV. These parents perceived their connections with other parents as their connections to the school. ‘It not only fun you know, we also learn things here’. – mother 9 of School IV. Their participation in this parental involvement activity not only facilitates their parental involvement in the school, but it also helps them to increase their social network (Warren and Mapp 2011) and social capital (Bourdieu 1986).

Besides their exclusionary practices towards fathers (see the paragraph women don’t want us men there) the interparental dynamics of this parent clique led to more parents feeling excluded. For example, it regularly happened that conversations started at the community centre and continued during the Parent Coffee Mornings. The connections among parents in the clique included anecdotes and other references, which made it challenging for other parents to join. For the parent clique of School IV, it was important to build social relationships with each other predominantly for sociability reasons. ‘I live in a small house so I can hardly receive any people. Very nice to meet the mothers here (in school)’ – mother 6 of School IV. For them, friendship was a central source of social support. In this, they demonstrated ‘bonding’ capital that focuses on building ties between people of similar backgrounds (Turkish speaking, female, volunteered both in school as well as at the community centre) (Warren and Mapp 2011). This parent clique was less interested in influencing the school policy, and therefore they were not members of any official parent-teacher-organisation nor parent representative board. Nevertheless, they attended all school-based parental involvement activities, and this parent clique represented the most active volunteers in the school. In return, the school management put them in charge of the decisions about which parents were able to join in which school activity, including the highly popular yearly school trip; parents seek out the opportunity to participate in the yearly school trip, but most are denied this opportunity due to limit available space.

A family day out is very expensive, let alone a holiday. We cannot afford that. So when the school asks me if I want to join for free, well I won't say no. I'm going to an amusement park with my three kids and their friends for free, what more could you want? – mother 1 of School IV.

As a result, this parent clique had informal power to shape all school-based parental involvement activities, which they did.

Using cliques to build power

Different than in School IV, the foremost interest of the parent cliques of School II and School III were to gain and maintain power in order to influence the school policy. At School II, Parental Coffee Morning activities were only organised twice a year, but the parent clique at this school nevertheless had their ways of influencing the school policy. One parent explains: ‘I’m also on the parents’ council and I hang out with a few parents, so I hear the things about the school that I need to hear’. – father 4 of School II. Another parent was more direct in this by saying: ‘I’ll make sure to come to every activity for parents, so I can make my voice heard’. –, mother 7 of School II. Members of this parent clique were represented in all official parent-teacher organisations in the school. This also applied to the members of parent clique of School III. Below is an excerpt from fieldnotes on how the parent clique of School III operates during a Parental Coffee Morning.

It is a regular Parental Coffee Morning activity at School III. There is no specific topic to be discussed and there is no external guest invited. Parents may simply grab a drink for free and talk to each other. The Parental Involvement Worker (PIW) is also present for questions and a chat. She first shares the latest information on the school. Members of the parent clique of this school all arrive at their fixed table in the middle of the room. Each member ‘has’ their own chair. At this table there is one chair available. The PIW, who is new, walks towards the empty seat. There is a sigh of indignation in the room. Mother 5 of School III whispers: ‘You’re not supposed to sit there, everyone knows that.’ While the PIW smiles back kindly at the parent who makes this comment, she makes a move to sit down. Father 1 of School III, a member of the parent clique says: ‘Sorry, but this seat is already taken.’ As a result, the PIW sits down at another table. At the parent clique’s table there are six parent clique members with the only father at the head of the table. The other five mothers of whom two with a White Dutch background and three with an Asian background (Chinese and Philippian) sit around him. The head of the table takes out his notepad and goes through all the points step by step. This concerns both the information about the school that they have yet to receive, and information that they themselves still have to pass on to the school management. The remaining tasks are divided among the members of the parent clique. After one cup of coffee, the clique gets up and leaves together. The rest of the eight parents attending the Parental Coffee Morning activity divide themselves over the other two tables and are already busy with their second or third cup of coffee, tea, or hot chocolate. Their conversations are about everything but school-related matters, such as where to buy the latest bargains and recipes for quick and cheap cooking. After about an hour, the PIW asks all remaining parents to leave, as this Parental Coffee Morning activity is officially over. – Field-notes from School III, December 2018.

The parent clique of School III operated in a very different manner than the other parental cliques. With the parent clique of School III there was less interacting with other parents, but the clique was controlling. They viewed the weekly Parent Coffee Mornings as their basis for coming together, catching up, and exchanging strategies. Besides the Parent Coffee Morning activities, they were all taking part in the official parent-school organisation in order to keep abreast of the latest developments. For example, one father was a member of the parent-teacher-organisation, two mothers were parent representatives, and the other three mothers were represented in the parent council. Whereas non-clique parents of this school were frustrated they had ‘difficulties reaching the school management’ [School III, mother 10], this was not the case for the parent clique at this school. The parent clique at School III held the power to not only shape Parent Coffee Mornings as the tight-knit nature of the group excluded involvement from other parents in this school-based parental activity, but as part of the formal parent-teacher-organisations they were also involved in the school’s decision-making processes as the school management only consulted them to include parents’ perspectives. Hence, the parent clique of this school facilitated both their own parental involvement in the school and built power by establishing useful contacts with each other and with the school management, while excluding other parents from all of this as a result of their interparental dynamics during Parent Coffee Mornings.

Discussion

Parental involvement in students’ education has been repeatedly shown to have a positive influence on educational outcomes of students (Domina 2005; Hoover-Dempsey and Sandler 1995; Jeynes 2007; Jeynes 2012). In the Dutch setting, a common school initiative aimed at improving parental involvement is Parent Coffee Mornings. These school-based parental involvement activities are conceptualised by the schools as low-stakes opportunities to welcome parents who do not normally participate in school-based activities. The purpose of organising Parent Coffee Mornings is to familiarise parents with the school community, to exchange information about schooling and education, and to strengthen contact among parents. Although Parent Coffee Mornings were successful in strengthening contact between and among parents for some, we found that these activities also served as a site for exclusionary practices among others. Indeed, the very activity meant to promote involvement and inclusion quite often had the opposite effect. Prior research has begun to delve into related questions of social capital, parental networks, and parental sense of community and belonging as predictors of parental involvement and finds that stronger parent ties to other parents have positive outcomes for levels of parental involvement (Brown et al. 2022; Gamoran et al. 2012; Jasis and Ordoñez-Jasis 2012; Li and Fischer 2017). What, then, are the barriers to creating ties among parents? Our research revealed three key themes of exclusion practices among parents, which we presented in three cases: gender (women don’t want us men there), language (speak your language), and parent cliques.

Consistent with prior research, Parent Coffee Mornings were largely attended by mothers. Our data showed that some fathers felt uncomfortable attending Parent Coffee Mornings, because these activities were constructed as a female activity, and in practice were dominated by female attendees. Interview data with fathers also revealed that mothers were explicitly excluding fathers from the coffee mornings by telling them not to attend. This finding aligns with the work of Jasis and Ordoñez-Jasis (2012) who re-framed the predominantly female parental involvement as mother-led activism. Women found power and a voice through engaging with their children’s educational experiences and valued the opportunity to actively influence such an important aspect of family life. Women from our study may have been seeking to create and then preserve the boundaries of their sphere of influence at school. As our data and prior research repeatedly showed, these findings intersect with race, ethnicity, and culture and support the notion that parental involvement should continue to be considered from an intersectional standpoint.

Researchers looking into educational dynamics in the United States note that language also serves as a significant barrier to parental involvement in school-based activities for immigrant families (Abrams and Gibbs 2002; Calzada et al. 2015; Ji and Koblinsky 2009; Pavlakis, Conry, and del Rosal 2019). Our findings, drawn from Dutch ethnographic data, corroborate prior research that language differences create (and maintain) barriers between parents. Interestingly, our data showed that native Dutch-speaking parents felt excluded from conversation within a group where the majority of parents had a migration background whose native language was Arabic. Considering prior research about language and exclusion in parental involvement, those scholars who study barriers to involvement highlight language as a factor that excludes immigrant parents, but not native parents. Our research presents an opposite perspective. The implications of this finding are somewhat contradictory: a community with a strong connection to the native language of parents is a positive contributing factor to involvement for parents with a migration background, yet this may lead to other parents, in our case native Dutch-speaking, feeling excluded. Moreover, this might create a barrier to native Dutch speaking teachers as well.

The importance of parent cliques, in terms of their influence on schools and their power to potentially include or exclude other parents, is perhaps the most significant finding in our study. This phenomenon was present in each of the five primary schools studied. While the composition of the cliques differed from school to school, their function remained largely consistent. Clique members were overtly visible participants at school activities, dominated Parent Coffee Mornings, and wielded institutional power at the schools as a result of being tapped by school officials for input and information. Parent cliques not only gained and utilised institutional power; the cliques also acted as gatekeepers for other potentially ‘involved’ parents. The existence of parental cliques forms a danger to inclusive activities and therefore should remain in focus for educators in terms of undermining inclusive activities as well as for researchers in terms of future studies as to how exactly these phenomena occur, their function, as well as potential manners in reducing their influence. Across lines of gender, race, ethnicity, language, schools who seek to engage more reticent parents need to be aware of the possibility that powerful cliques of parents may be undermining the school’s efforts toward inclusion.

Yet, despite this, we acknowledge the fact that many schools need parent volunteers to properly function. The nature of Dutch schools necessitates that parents volunteer to help with classroom activities, field trips, and more. Without this parental involvement, it is likely that school activities would have to be limited. While the power and exclusionary potential of parent cliques may be problematic for promoting wider parental involvement, schools may be understandably hesitant to upset the status quo and risk alienating the most active parental volunteers. In future research, we hope to have the opportunity to further investigate the dual nature of these parent cliques. We do suggest that school leaders identify the parent cliques that may exist at their schools, and that school leaders understand that any inclusion programme or initiative for less ‘involved’ parents may be impacted by these cliques. Each individual school and its administration may choose to respond to this knowledge in ways that are appropriate for their situation, but even the acknowledgement of such cliques and their potential power will be useful for school administration as they consider issues of parental involvement, more generally.

Limitations

While we believe that our data and findings contribute significantly to the literature on parental involvement in schools, we also acknowledge limitations of our study. To begin, our data are uniquely Dutch. Parent Coffee Mornings, while perhaps existing in different guises and with different labels in other countries, are a Dutch phenomenon and focusing our study on these coffee mornings therefore might limit its relatability to other educational settings. An important issue about our study is the functionality of the Parent Coffee Mornings. Is this parental involvement? Critics may deem these activities as merely ‘chatting’ without much direct connection to student outcomes. However, as noted by Curry and Holter (2019), parents themselves conceptualise building networks among parents at schools as part of parental involvement. Finally, it is important to note that the vast majority of parents do not attend Parent Coffee Morning activities. Although we have shown that the group of parents who participated in these school-based parental involvement activities varied in their social, ethnic, and gender backgrounds, due to the Dutch ‘freedom of school choice’ and ‘freedom of education’, it remains a specific group of less than ten percent of the parents in total. In their effort to increase this number, schools should take the interparental dynamics into account that may shape school-based involvement activities. Compared to other school-based parental involvement activities, those activities which are directly linked to their child(ren) and which are not organised too often, such as school report reviews (four times a year), introductory meeting with the teacher (once a year), year-opening/ending festivity (once or twice a year), and the school trip (once a year) have a high(er) attendance rate. The other school-based parental involvement activities that vary greatly per school have an even lower attendance rate than the Parent Coffee Mornings.

Conclusion

The research we have presented offers significant contributions to the literature on parental involvement in schools, and particularly to the ways in which parents’ behaviours and practices might exclude other parents. In contrast to what Curry and Holter (2019) and Rangel, Shoji, and Gamoran (2020) had hoped would happen when schools explicitly provide opportunities for all parents to connect with each other, our research shows that this does not necessarily mean that all benefit. In contrast to some of the US-based studies, our findings reveal that not speaking the majority language can also form bonds that facilitate involvement. Thus, interestingly, our study reveals that practices that encourage community connections and parental engagement for all, create opportunities for some, and barriers for others. Our study also showed that parent cliques hold significant institutional power at schools, are a vital part of the ways in which current schools operate, and also foster exclusionary practices against other parents. Taken together, our findings point to several clear mechanisms of exclusion of which schools and communities should be aware. We believe that these mechanisms of exclusion are vital to examine as school administrators strive to involve as many parents as possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Low educated is a combination of Primary Education (internationally known as ISCED 1) and Lower Secondary (vocational) Education (internationally known as ISCED 2).

2 The International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) is the official framework used to facilitate international comparisons of education systems developed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). It runs from ISCED 1 (Primary Education) to ISCED 8 (Doctoral degree). ISCED 2 is Lower Secondary (vocational) Education (in Dutch context known as ‘low educated’) and ISCED 3 is Upper Secondary (vocational) Education (in Dutch context known as a basic qualification).

3 With the exception of the Dutch province of Friesland and in Caribbean Netherlands (Bonaire, St. Eustatius and Saba) where local languages may also be used in education.