Barriers To Children's Services Case Study

Critically discuss the barriers some parents may face in engaging with one area of children’s services. What role can practitioners play in overcoming some of these barriers?

Globally, there is a growing appreciation of the importance of engaging parents, carers and communities in working together with children’s services to improve the outcomes for children and young people. Whilst it must be accepted that the majority of parents will only want what is best for their child, there remain many barriers that potentially prevent parents from engaging with children’s services and improving their child’s chances of achieving their full potential. This essay will start by examining how the concept of different forms of capital as proposed by
Bourdieu (1986) can affect parental engagement. It will focus on some of the barriers that may be faced by parents, with specific reference to fathers and ethnic minority parents, within a school setting. It will then go on to examine what practitioners can do to help overcome the barriers faced by these groups of parents. The author will draw upon studies/papers/articles from academic journals to substantiate her argument, specifically Harris and Goodall (2008), Cullen et al., (2011), Potter et al., (2013), Crozier and Davies (2005), and Meyer et al., (2011), and cite examples of practice within both her own setting and the Saltley Cluster, Birmingham. For the purposes of this essay the term parent will be taken to mean ‘mothers, fathers, carers and other adults with responsibility for caring for a child, including looked after children’ (DfES, 2006, cited in Leverett, 2014).

Children and families do not exist within a vacuum, but within a whole myriad of linked experiences and relationships. Bronfenbrenner’s (1979, cited in Stone and Foley, 2014) ecological model of child development illustrates that a child’s overall development is influenced by more than just family relationships, and includes school and the wider environment in which they live. Fostering a close and productive relationship between home and school will therefore be beneficial to children, as both practitioners and parents can work together and contribute to effectively support the child. However, all parents are different, and whilst many may have the skills and knowledge to enable them to form good relationships with teachers and practitioners within schools, there are many others who do not possess the different types of resources that make this possible. These resources are known as capitals and can be subdivided into four categories; economic capital, concerned with financial physical and material resources; human capital, concerned with skills and knowledge possessed by people usually associated with education or work; social capital, concerned with connectivity and reciprocity between individuals; and cultural capital, concerned with how to use your social capital and other qualities to achieve your goals (Leverett, 2014). Bourdieu (1986, cited in Leverett, 2014) saw that forms of capital represented ‘resources and power’ which were ‘unequally distributed amongst a population’. Having one form of capital can be used to gain another form of capital, and the ability of some parents to manipulate this results in certain groups of children receiving advantages and opportunities that are not available to all. Leverett agrees, ‘Because social capital is unequally distributed amongst groups of parents, the consequences for individual children vary considerably’ (2014). Bourdieu believed that cultural capital could be described as ‘legitimate knowledge’, i.e. knowledge that is useful within a specific context. Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, ‘the dispositions an individual has to feel, think, behave or understand the world in a particular way’ (Jenkins, 2002, cited in Leverett, 2014), and field, ‘the social arena within which struggles or manoeuvres take place over a specific resource or stakes and access to them’ (Jenkins, 2002, cited in Leverett, 2014) explain what kinds of knowledge are legitimate. A parent who is using their knowledge of the local area to ensure they buy a house in the best school catchment area, is using their cultural capital to provide their child with an advantage. This advantage would not be available to parents who are not in possession of the same information. Groups of parents such as low income parents, ethnic minority parents, disabled parents or parents of children with disabilities find them selves facing barriers when engaging with schools, which are traditionally middle class environments, stressing middle class norms.

Research has shown that there is a ‘powerful association between parental engagement and student achievement’ (Harris and Goodall, 2008) and one of the barriers to parental involvement is often the school itself. This finding is supported by Harris and Goodall (2008) who undertook a qualitative study to explore the relationship between parental engagement and student achievement. Their findings show that for some parents there was a difference in perception between primary and secondary schools, and that parents felt engagement in primary education was easier, due to the interaction of parents at the school gate. This confirms Coleman’s (1997, cited in Leverett, 2014) concept of social capital, with parents forming connections and sharing knowledge in an informal setting. Many parents in the study reported that they felt a ‘sense of powerlessness in their interactions with the school’ (2008). Parents reported that communication from the school was often through email or letter, and this created a barrier to those parents with low levels of literacy. Although the study only collected data from 20 schools within England, the study still has relevance because schools were selected to ensure there was a broad geographical spread, a combination of rural and urban schools, and that the schools were diverse in terms of size, socio-economic status and ethnic minority percentages.

A second study which found the barrier to parental involvement lay also with the school was published in 2006 by Crozier and Harris, based upon a two year qualitative study of Bangladeshi and Pakistani parents in the north-east of England, undertaken by the Economic and Social Research Council. It consisted of a mixture of semi-structured and structured interviews with 157 households, 591 parents and children, and 69 youth workers and teachers. The research considered the views of the parents and the teachers in relation to home-school relations. The findings indicated there was a discrepancy between the expectations of the teachers – that parents should engage in their children’s education, and the expectations of the Bangladeshi and Pakistani parents – that teachers are the experts and engagement with school was not necessary. Literacy rates within the ethnic minority community were lower than for the surrounding population and therefore written communication from school, inviting parents to events such as parent’s evening and celebration assemblies failed to encourage parents into school, especially as the majority of the written communication was in English, rather than in a language more accessible to the parents. This lack of cultural understanding between the expectations of both sides is reinforcing a barrier that may be overcome. Firstly, all communication with the ethnic minority parents should be readily available in a language that they can understand – Urdu or Punjabi for example, or given orally to parents by bilingual practitioners. Secondly, more work needs to be done on how to attract the parents into school to engage in their children’s learning. Whilst this study was restricted to the north-east of England, the lessons learned could be applied to Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities over the whole UK.

The Saltley Cluster (Open University, 2008) in Birmingham encourages disadvantaged parents to engage by inviting them to attend reading, literacy and maths sessions, and using bilingual teaching assistants where necessary to communicate with ethnic minority parents in their own language. The practitioners model the actions and behavior that they would like to see replicated at home, and give the parents the confidence to try for themselves. Obviously it takes time to gain the trust of the parents, but by practitioners communicating effectively and stressing the benefits to both child and parent, it is to be hoped that parents will realize that they can make a difference in their child’s achievement. The ethnic minority parents, and other disadvantaged groups of parents such as low income or single parents families, can then use their own social and cultural capital to encourage further participation. In my own setting, we invite all parents of Reception and Year 1 children to attend phonics workshops, so that they can support their child’s learning at home. The sessions are offered both during the day, which attracts many non-working mothers with younger children, and again in the evening, which attracts working parents of both sexes. Parents are invited by letter, and those who fail to respond are then verbally invited by either the class teacher or teaching assistant. This personal touch ensures that we have a large percentage of parents attending. It has to be noted though that the school has a smaller percentage of disadvantaged or hard-to-reach parents than the national average. The importance of this level of family working was stressed through the ‘Every Child Matters’ (DfES, 2005) initiative, introduced by the Labour government, and now, sadly, defunct.

Fathers are a group that may face problems in engaging with schools for a variety of reasons. Primary schools are predominantly female orientated places, with the vast majority of staff being female. Many female practitioners may feel uncomfortable in engaging with fathers, especially fathers who may not possess a certain form of cultural capital. “Staff are good at engaging with fathers if they are polite, articulate and middle class. But, if they are young, or from an ethnic minority, they are regarded as too much trouble” (Carvel, 2007, cited in Leverett, 2014). Fathers may also see involvement in schools as being for mothers. Cullen et al,.(2011) confirm this as a barrier in their qualitative study of the work of Parent Support Advisers (PSA) in engaging fathers in 12 local authorities in England. Their findings show that there was a cultural attitude indicating that childcare was a woman’s job on the part of local authorities, schools and men themselves. Fathers were also more likely to be in employment and therefore unable to access schools. The study however, failed to interview any fathers, but based its findings on interviews based solely with 97 PSAs. The implications for practitioners are difficult. Training may be required to enable female practitioners to feel more comfortable and confident in working with fathers, but also practitioners must find some way of making the most of every encounter with fathers, as their contact with school would seem to be more restricted due to employment patterns. Patterns of employment are changing and becoming more fluid, and practitioners may be able to make the most of this by offering opportunities for fathers to become practically involved in their child’s learning. The Saltley Cluster (Open University, 2008) invites parents to attend after school clubs with their children, and by offering an activity such as a lego/KNex club, fathers may be drawn into the school and begin to see the benefits of working alongside their children, in both formal and informal settings.

These findings were confirmed in the study of a one year father inclusion project (Potter et al., 2012) in the north of England. The study aimed to find out the level and nature of father involvement in the early years and school setting before and after the project, through attendance data and semi-structured telephone interviews. Whilst the sample group was extremely small (only 7 fathers/grandfathers) it did represent 50% of the men who participated in the project. The project provided opportunities for fathers to become engaged in children’s play and learning, by arranging a series of events designed to appeal to men such as a farm trip, a funday, papier mache making and constructing a bird box, all giving ‘valuable opportunities for shared learning opportunities’ (Potter et al., 2012, p 81). The fathers involved were able to see the benefits of engaging both with their children and with the school setting, and practitioners felt it lead to a ‘better rapport’ (Potter et al,. 2012, p 84) between the setting and the fathers involved. Practitioners felt it made it communication easier and lead to a greater level of understanding, making it easier to raise issues that they may not have previously been able to raise.

For practitioners to overcome the barriers that some parents may face in engaging with school, it is very clear that forming effective relationships with parents is paramount.
One of the most effective ways of doing this in a school setting is through the use of home visits. Meyer at al. (2011) conducted a qualitative study of teachers’ perceptions on the benefits of home visits. The study consisted of interviews with 29 teachers in the Midwest of the USA, in a school district with a higher than state average of free school meals (65.7% in 2006 as opposed to the state average of 42.2%). The findings indicated that home visits ‘opened the lines of communication’ and felt parents were ‘more willing’ (Meyer et al., 2011) to contact the school should an issue arise. However, teachers did report some parents were reluctant to schedule a home visit, possibly due to fear of being judged on their home conditions or parenting skills. The report did not make clear however, which group of parents failed to arrange a home visit, but in my own experience of arranging and conducting home visits to prospective Reception parents, it is often the most disadvantaged parents who fail to make an appointment and would most benefit from the opportunity to form a friendly and non threatening relationship with their child’s practitioner. Meyer et al. (2011) found that practitioners reported that home visits ‘resulted in parents playing a more active role in supporting their child’s learning’.
Although the report was based on a study in the USA, it still has relevance as culturally, there is very little difference between parents, children and teachers in the USA and the UK. Not every school supports home visits, but practitioners can also engage with parents of Reception children through offering the opportunity to meet staff and parents at informal open events, invitations to ‘stay and play’ sessions in the term before school starts, and creating information booklets with practitioners photos and information about the expectations of the setting.

To conclude, the evidence overwhelmingly shows that children perform better when parents engage effectively in their child’s learning. Whilst some groups of parents are able to confidently engage with schools and access the social and cultural capital required to navigate successfully through the education system, other groups of parents may find barriers to their engagement with schools. Groups such as low-income parents, ethnic minority parents, single parent families and fathers may not possess the requiredcapital to take advantage of the situation. Barriers such as language, cultural expectations and lack of time may be very real reason for parents to fail to engage with schools. Schools that most successfully engage with parents employ a wide interpretation of parental engagement, and ensure their strategies for engagement match with the values of the parents they are targeted at (Goodall and Vorhaus, 2011). A relevant point for practice is that staff should have excellent communication skills, be open, welcoming and friendly, and be able to approach parents from different cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. Training should be provided in parental engagement and building relationships, either through ITT or ongoing professional development. There are also solutions to the logistical barriers to parental engagement, such as considering parental working patterns when scheduling school programmes and activities. However, it must be accepted that no matter how hard practitioners try, there are just some parents who for various reasons, fail to engage with schools and their child’s learning. The important thing is that parents should be given as many opportunities and different ways of engaging as possible, as the benefits to the child and their chance of academic success are considerable when home and school work together.

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Bibliography

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