In 2008 Danielle Cronin was awarded a Sir Winston Churchill Fellowship to study policy initiatives and associated strategies for supporting parent engagement in schooling in the United States and the United Kingdom. Danielle is the Executive Director of the Council of Catholic School Parents NSW/ACT, Chair of the National Catholic Education Commission’s Parent Committee and has two children at St Charles’ in the Sydney Archdiocese.

Most of us don’t need 40 years of research to tell us that parent involvement is important for children’s success at school and in life. Involvement in your child’s education can take many forms including being involved at the school (as class parents, on the P&F, at working bees) or at home (helping with homework, reading to your children, involving them in extra-curricular activities or just being interested in what they do at school).

More recent research however is telling us that deeper forms of parent engagement with schooling are also needed to further enhance student achievement and outcomes, close achievement gaps and build social capital and social inclusion.

Engagement implies parents taking their place alongside teachers in the schooling of their children, fitting together their knowledge of children, teaching and learning, with teachers’ knowledge about the child and teaching and learning (Pushor: 2007). Engagement sees parents as an essential part of the learning process and an extended part of the ‘pedagogic process’ to support the academic achievement of children (Harris and Goodall: 2007). Strong engagement has clear benefits for all children, parents and schools but it has particular benefits for more disadvantaged communities and those with special needs.

In Australia we are entering an important new era in relation to schools. We have the ‘education revolution’ and as part of that a growing recognition of the importance of parental engagement and the importance of more authentic partnerships between home, school and the broader community to support children’s learning. An associated idea is also emerging around broadening the limits of schools to be ‘hubs’ of extended or ‘wrap-around’ services to support the particular needs of the communities that support them.

An exciting opportunity exists for us as parents (and for schools, education offices and governments) to think about parent engagement in new ways. This will involve broadening old definitions of parent involvement, exploring new types of engagement and making sure parent engagement is seen as complementary to efforts in the areas of school reform, student achievement (including closing the achievement gap) and building community. The Australian government has begun to make headway in this important area by making partnerships between schools and parents a key policy objective. We also now have the National Family School Partnership Framework and the Family, School and Community Partnership Bureau to assist us.

The Fellowship also identified an increasing desire for governments to expand traditional definitions of schools and schooling and the desire to embed family engagement in whole-of-school and system-wide efforts to promote learning across all of the settings where children live and learn. Schools are being seen as ‘hubs’ for a range of complementary services to support children and families and the broader community including early childhood services to health and community services.

Source: June 2009 issue of Parent News Update, published by the Sydney Federation of Catholic School Parents.