The relationship between primary schools and parents in a Tyneside County Borough.

Abstract

The specific stimulus for the investigation was the recommendation of the Plowden Report of 1969 of a minimum programme of practical methods by which primary schools could involve parents more directly in the life of the school. However, because of the high degree of authority of the headteacher in matters relating to school policy it was considered that the implementation of a programme of innovation of this type would be to a large extent dependent on the initiative and goodwill of the individual headteacher. Accordingly, the research was focused upon forty-three primary headteachers in a Tyneside County Borough, representing all the primary schools of one Local Education Authority. Two measuring instruments were used in the research - an attitude scale designed for the research and a structured survey interview. The attitude scale was used to provide quantitative data about the attitudes of five principal categories of headteacher respondent and the interview to provide qualitative detail about attitudes to parental involvement with schools, feelings about the headteacher's role in this area, and information about contacts in current use by the schools in the survey sample. The combined evidence of the experimental attitude scale and the survey interviews, led to the conclusion that there was a relationship between the attitude of a headteacher to parental involvement and the type and frequency of contacts provided by a school, although in this survey this attitude appeared to be related to the age of the headteacher. A further analysis of the interview transcripts revealed possible attitudinal barriers to closer parental- involvement with primary schools and offered possible explanations for dislike of particular types of contact between schools and parents. These attitudes appeared to be related to a particular view of the respective roles of parents and teachers. The experimental attitude scale proved to be a reliable and valid measure of these attitudes, with a split half reliability co-efficient of .62 and when correlated with quantitative data obtained from the survey interviews, the degree of correlation was calculated to be .72.