The positioning of parental engagement within England's current educational policy landscape

Abstract

Parental engagement with children's learning is strongly linked with improved outcomes for children and has thus become a major focus of educational policy around the world. Yet to date, there has been little scrutiny of how parental engagement is positioned within policy documents, nor how this relates to parental engagement practices. This paper analyses the positioning of parental engagement in England's current national educational policy landscape. Through applying Taylor's et al.'s (1997) policy analysis framework, we identify seemingly inconsistent conceptualisations of parental engagement appearing across different policy documents. This may explain the apparent mismatch between the types of parental engagement supported by research and those being implemented in schools. The analysis also highlights a lack of focus on equity in relation to parental engagement policy statements. We recommend that the Department for Education work with other stakeholders—including parents, teachers, teacher educators, school leaders and researchers—to produce a clearly articulated vision for parental engagement, which could be used to ensure a coherent approach across policies. Furthermore, we suggest an explicit focus on engaging all parents. Without this, the potential of parental engagement for improving children's outcomes and narrowing attainment gaps is unlikely to be realised.