Developing a School’s Work with its Parents: Key Task or Optional Extra?

During the last decade, relations between parents and their children’s schools have undergone profound changes. One does not have to go back far to find a period in which all that was formally required from teachers in this area was a rather minimal commitment, intermittent contact and almost entirely oneway traffic! Of course many schools, supported by committed LEAs, went much further than this. The post-war growth of ‘good practice’, through more effective home-school communication and through the involvement of parents in the life and work of their children’s schools, has been both varied and successful, especially in the primary phase.