www.publicinvolvement.org.uk

The new Children's Plan strongly encourages schools to set up parent bodies to help increase parental involvement in schools. Caroline Millar who helped set up a Parent Forum in her daughters' primary school two years ago reports on how it is going and wonders why the forum's impact has been so limited.

When, full of hope, I blogged about the setting up of our Parents' Forum I promised to keep you posted on how it was going:

"For most people the real indicator of success will be when we start to see some of our ideas implemented and some of our concerns addressed. That is the challenge that faces the school, and the Forum".

On a good day I can see that some things have got better: staff are a bit less resistant to the idea of listening to parents and are beginning to see the forum as a place they can go to sound out their ideas with parents; forum meetings are well attended and parents now have a place to go with their ideas and their concerns. But anyone who is actively involved in any sort of user group will recognise the sinking feeling you get when you suddenly realise you may have been banging your head on the proverbial brick wall for too long.

Tea and sympathy not enough

Despite huge amounts of goodwill and hard work, there is a growing sense of frustration amongst those who attend forum meetings. Most of the issues which parents identified as priorities two years ago are still there as outstanding issues and almost none of the ideas the forum has come up with have been implemented. It is easy to understand why people lose interest in this sort of "involvement".  It is all very well for everyone to sit together in a room drinking tea and coming up with great ideas. You might even get staff to join in. But somehow it always comes back to the same old dilemma: a user group is little more than a talking shop unless the people with the power to make things happen recognise their duties and responsibilities towards their users.

If people are pushing, why not open the door?

The government has recently produced a toolkit to help schools, governors and parents in particular, to set up parent council in England and Wales (setting up a parent council, links to Adobe PDF). I was closely involved in developing this guidance and during the process I was struck by how anxious teachers and governors were (and remain) that parents might use these new mechanisms as a way of taking the running of the schools out of their hands. But as we know from other areas, most users have no desire to run the institution. Indeed this probably explains why so many schools have difficulty recruiting parents to their governing bodies. Most parents know where they would like to be but they recognise that it is for the professionals to work out how to get there. They want to feel they have an input and they believe that public institutions have a duty to be responsive. In my experience as both a parent and governor, parents become "pushy" only when they have reached a state of such frustration that they feel the only way to make something happen is to do it themselves or call on some higher authority to help them. And it should not be forgotten that a very large number of parents do everything they can to avoid being involved in school (something that schools often lament without ever really wondering why).

Governors should be transparent but not invisible

In the case of schools, the people who are in a position to make things happen are the governors. Accountability and transparency are essential and governing bodies should be able to demonstrate that they have robust processes for hearing what all parents have to say and acting upon it. Parents are much less likely to make "unreasonable" demands if they understand the school's priorities and how it is spending it resources. In the case of my school's parents forum, I was somewhat taken aback to discover that none of the other (newer) parents at the planning meeting even knew who the governors were nor had any clear idea about who the governors were or what they did, nor how the forum might influence the decisions made by the governors.

Policy Governance, described elsewhere on this website, provides a good model for school governing bodies who want to be able to respond positively to the expectations of parents. Valerie Moore's general statement about how boards are run clearly applies as much to governing bodies as to other types of board:

 "There is much greater demand for accountability around both the ends and the means used to achieve them. Customer demands are now influenced by a whole range of pre-occupations and issues which have to be recognised and taken on board by the organisations serving them."

Everyone these days seems to accept that parental involvement in schools is a good thing in theory but putting it into practice will require real commitment from schools and particularly from governing bodies.  Perhaps this is a good time for them to look again at how they can really make a difference. Parents might even be able to give them a few ideas.

The M-A-C partnership specialises in public involvement in all sectors. If you want to know more about how we can help you with parental involvement in schools, contact Caroline Millar.