ABSTRACT
In order to work in partnership with all parents, some awareness and reflection on the potential barriers that can impede effective engagement between parents and practitioners is necessary. This chapter suggests that practitioners to reflect on what they are already doing and introduces they to some opportunities to think beyond their practice and aims to develop trust-building activities that will work for their setting. Parents whose own recollection of education and childhood was negative could find it difficult to feel comfortable in an educational environment: ‘Parents’ view of their role as a teacher and communicating with teachers and helping their children with school work, may, in part, be a result of their own educational experiences. ‘A deficit discourse portrays particular parents, largely working-class, black, immigrant or sole parents, as failing to be good parents due to their inability to support their children in their learning as evident in their invisibility in schools’.
