![]()
Part One Parents and school — a brief history
![]()
Chapter 2
Parents: help or hindrance?
The publication in 1967 of the Plowden Report, Children and their Primary Schools,1 was such an important turning-point in home-school relations that all developments since that time can be seen as relating either directly to the Report or to the lively debate which followed in its wake. For the first time, there was official recognition of the potential role which parents could play in their children's schooling. The Report drew on a great deal of research on the relationship between home background and educational achievement. It faithfully mirrored the growing number of initiatives by teachers to narrow the distance between home and school. Inevitably, it also drew on many aspects of the conventional wisdom of the day which were subsequently questioned and found to be lacking. In this chapter, we will look critically at the attitudes towards parents which led to, and informed, Plowden.
No parents beyond this point
We have travelled a long way in our ideas of what school is all about. For many years education was the exclusive domain of teachers. Ever since Plato there had been a strong belief that education should be carried out far from the interference of parents and there was no challenge to the view that teaching should be carried out behind closed doors. Gates were shut after the register had been called, visitors were actively discouraged and very few people other than officials were allowed to enter when school was in progress. The division between home and school was a very clear one, marked symbolically by the white line in the playground which parents were not expected to cross.
It is easy to understand why parents were not involved in their children's education for so many years. School was seen as a means of compensating for what was lacking in the home, whether it be basic skills to ensure children's survival in a literate world or, later, free meals to ensure that their diet was adequate. Because teachers saw themselves as compensating for the deficiencies of parents, it is not surprising that parents were so totally excluded from their children's education.
There were, of course, important exceptions to this way of thinking.2 There is evidence, for instance, that as early as the 1920s, some nursery schools held weekly clubs attended by as many as 60-70 parents. A little later in the 1930s, the Home and School Council of Great Britain broke new ground, inviting parents into school to see how their children worked. By and large, though, the position remained unchanged for many years. There was a great physical and philosophical divide between the two main educative forces in children's lives: home and school.
The 1944 Education Act
Ever since the introduction of compulsory primary education in the 1870s, school had been seen as the panacea for all ills. It was widely assumed that as soon as the masses were adequately educated many of the social problems of the day would disappear. Until the mid-1940s large numbers of children were denied a secondary education because their parents could not afford it. The 1944 Education Act was designed to be a great democratizing force, making secondary education available to all for the first time. It was widely assumed that the Act would play an important part in bringing about change and greater social justice.
The educational provision made in the wake of the 1944 Act was informed by the received wisdom of the time that intellectual ability was genetically determined. A tripartite system of grammar, secondary modern and technical schools would allow all children to achieve their educational potential. Yet, by the late 1950s, the inadequacies of this system were becoming clear. There was a growing awareness that, despite the fact that education was now compulsory and universal, not all children were benefiting from it to the same extent. Concern was being expressed both at the uneven distribution of grammar schools through the country and the fact that middle-class children were obtaining a far larger proportion of grammar school places than their working-class peers.
Attempts to explain the failure of the 1944 Act were based on the same pathological model which featured so prominently in the early years of this century. Stress was placed on the inadequacies of working-class families and their inability to provide the kind of intellectual environment which was essential for academic success. Value-laden expressions such as 'disadvantage', 'cultural and linguistic deprivation' and 'compensatory education' became clearly established in the educational vocabulary of the day. The task of the school was to compensate for the disadvantage which working-class children experienced and one of the ways in which this could be done was to educate their parents.
It was now argued, for instance, that the major determinants of educational success were social circumstances, motivation, the family and home, rather than teachers and the curriculum.3 It was suggested that parents help the learning style of their children by passing on confidence not through knowledge but by attitudes.4 Throughout the 1960s an increasing body of research began to suggest that parents might well have the ability to help children not only in the short term but with long-lasting results.5
The myth of verbal deprivation
A great deal of attention in the debate on the adequacy or otherwise of working-class families was placed on the language which they used with their children. The major impetus for this discussion was the work of Basil Bernstein6 who postulated two polar language codes - the 'elaborated' and the 'restricted' codes. In the light of the evidence that working-class children were less likely to do well at all stages of education, he argued that the different distribution of these two codes was a possible major cause. Bernstein's work was widely interpreted as suggesting that standard English could be equated with the elaborated code and non-standard working-class dialects with the restricted code. Bernstein himself has strongly denied that this was ever his intention, but his denials did not prevent this equation becoming widely accepted by teachers.
Bernstein's work or, more correctly, the misinterpretation of his work, continues to inform popular opinion on working-class speech. The 1975 Bullock Report,7 for instance, advocates that health visitors should urge parents to 'bathe their children in language'. Five years later, a project was set up in the Ladywood area of Birmingham involving health visitors, speech therapists and social workers.8 Contact was made with mothers in supermarkets and workers distributed children with 'Mum, talk to me' stickers. The rationale for this scheme was that inner-city children were simply not being spoken to enough by their parents in their vital early years. As late as 1985, writers such as Tough9 talk in stereotypical terms of homes where children do not engage in discussion with adults and ask them questions only when seeking permission.
The Bernsteinian stance has attracted bitter criticism from many different writers who hold that, while differences undoubtedly exist between working- and middle-class speech, they need not in any way support the notion of a linguistic deficit. It has been argued, for instance, that Bernstein's theory of language codes is both untestable and unrelated to linguistic evidence.10 It has also been suggested that Bernstein has failed to take into consideration the effect which situation can have on children's speech. Children who can appear 'non-verbal' or uncommunicative in formal situations like school can be shown to be normal, fluent speakers in other less stressful situations.11
Much recent research by writers such as Wells12 and Tizard and Hughes13 has shown that the main differences in language use occur not between middle- and working-class children but between home and school. At home conversations are frequently longer and more equally balanced between adult and child. Children ask more questions and spend more time in conversation with adults. Parents play much more with their children, talk to them much more and answer many more questions than do teachers. The notion embodied in the Bullock Report and elsewhere that professionals should offer advice and suggestions to parents on how to talk to their children is seriously challenged by research findings of this kind.
A changing population
Throughout its history, British society has never been either monolingual or monocultural. However, population changes on an unprecedented scale took place during the 1950s and 1960s. The postwar period was a time of rapid economic expansion. The higher paid industrial jobs tended to be filled by English workers. Physically demanding jobs with low pay and anti-social hours became increasingly unattractive, creating a vacuum which was filled by immigrant labour. In response to advertising campaigns conducted by employers like London Transport and the National Health Service, large numbers of British citizens from the New Commonwealth - mainly the Indian subcontinent and the Caribbean - came to settle in Britain.
It was unfortunate that immigrant settlement came at a time when deficit views of working-class life and language were popular. The 'disadvantaged' label was rapidly extended to West Indian and Asian children. Language understandably formed an important focus for discussion. But, rather than starting from an appreciation of the linguistic skills which these children already had, teachers were wholly concerned with what they lacked, namely the ability to speak standard English. West Indians, speaking various Caribbean Creoles, with mainly English vocabulary but often quite distinct grammars, were treated with particular scorn. Their language has been described variously as 'babyish', 'careless and slovenly', 'lacking proper grammar', and 'very relaxed like the way they walk'. Remarks on this subject made by the National Association of School Masters were particularly revealing. They refer to West Indian language as a kind 'of plantation English which is socially unacceptable and inadequate for communication'.14
The languages of Asian children scarcely fared any better. For many years their mother tongues were totally excluded from schools. It is perhaps not surprising that when the prevailing model in education was a deficit model, there should be no acknowledgement or understanding of the importance of the language of the home, either in identity formation or in conceptual development. There have been reports of children who have been told to stop 'jabbering' in their mother tongue in the playground.15 And as one headteacher, consulted as part of a survey on LEA provision for immigrant children, commented: 'The Community Relations Officer thinks we should be teaching Gujarati but we couldn't start that caper. I've thought of starting French but we haven't enough space.'16
Nor were notions of deficiency and disadvantage restricted to immigrant languages. Their cultures, even when recognized as different, soon became stereotyped. West Indians were characterized as good at sport and music but unacademic and often uncooperative in class. Asians, on the other hand, were felt to be more passive and hardworking. Even so, their academic aspirations were felt to be unrealistic. Parents from both groups were assumed to be uninterested in their children's education, despite very strong indications to the contrary. Sadly, there is evidence that these stereotypes are still widespread today.17
Ethnic-minority children, like working-class children before them, were considered problems. Both groups received special attention from the Department of Education and Science's (DES) Education Disadvantage Unit which set up in the 1970s. There is little evidence of a change in official attitudes since that time. In 1981 the DES disregarded a recommendation from the Home Affairs Committee that a separate unit concerned solely with multi-racial education should be established to avoid any suggestion that ethnic-minority children were in some way deficient. The DES library still arranges books on multi-racial education alongside those on special education and disability.18
The Plowden Report
By the time Lady Plowden's Committee of Inquiry into Children and their Primary Schools began to take evidence in the mid-1960s, research indicated that closer links between home and schools were essential for educational advance. The committee drew on existing and specially commissioned research on the relationship between home and school and how this might affect the level of children's attainment. It concluded that differences in home background explained more of the variation in children's school achievements than did differences in educational provision and that it was therefore vitally important to involve parents more closely in the education of their children.
While the research on which the Plowden Report drew demonstrated without a doubt the differences in achievement between working- and middle-class children, the interpretation of these findings was sometimes woefully inadequate.19 This can be illustrated by the way in which, for the purposes of statistical analysis, they clustered together variables as disparate as 'parent attendance at Open Evenings' and 'parental wish for children to receive post-compulsory education', under the heading of 'interest in education'. Researchers thus failed to realize that parents may not have attended Open Evenings because of difficulties over shift-work, or simply because they felt too intimidated, and that they may none the less have been very interested in their children's education.
There is now ample evidence to suggest that all parents - with a small number of pathological exceptions - are interested in the education of their children.20 When given a specific task and adequate guidance and assurance, the majority of parents from all social and ethnic backgrounds have been found to be anxious to help their children. There is also evidence from outside mainstream education of a high level of parental interest. For instance, the setting up by the British Black community of Saturday or supplementary schools to teach skills which parents believe their children are not learning in mainstream schools seriously challenges the widespread stereotype of Black parents who do not care about their children's education.21
Ironically the main thrust for the Plowden Report was essentially the same as that of traditional educationalists: responsibility for the poor educational performance of working-class children was placed very firmly on the shoulders of working-class families themselves rather than on the school. School is seen as compensating for the deficiencies of home; working-class and ethnic minority children are believed to be lacking in those essential skills which middle-class children acquire before they reach the school gates. Although the deficit model was challenged and discredited on many different fronts throughout the 1970s, many teachers still cling to the idea that their task is to compensate for disadvantage.
This position has come under increasing fire. It has been argued that suffering from socio-economic disadvantage is not at all like suffering from a vitamin deficiency: the solution is not as simple as dosing the patient with appropriate levels of compensation. It has also been suggested that labels such as 'disadvantage' and 'deprivation' are more a reflection of dominant class values than objective truth. Just because something is different, it does not necessarily follow that it is deficient.
With the value of hindsight, the preoccupation with class differences in education in the 1950s, 1960s, and much of the 1970s, seems very much like a smokescreen obscuring a vitally important issue. While the difference in the performance of middle-class and working-class children is indeed a question of serious concern for educators, the treatment which this matter received in the Plowden Report had the effect of diverting attention from the notion that all parents should have more access to and a greater say in the schooling of their children.
None the less, the Plowden Report was to be a watershed in the development of parental involvement in school. For the first time a government report set out a programme for contact between home and school. It recommended that the head and the class teacher should meet children before beginning school; that parents should meet with teachers and see children's work regularly; that teachers should visit homes; that primary schools should be used as much as possible out of school hours; and that parent-teacher associations should be formed. There was clearly an assumption that if schools were able to communicate to parents what they were trying to do, parental attitudes would become more favourab...
