ABSTRACT
This chapter briefly reviews home-school contacts in Britain up to the present, noting that much of the literature on home-school relations has used a simplistic social class model in which 'working-class' homes have been regarded as deficient and less likely to care about children's achievements or pastoral needs. It also covers problems inherent in creating partnerships, especially with ethnic minority parents and parents of children with special educational needs, the experiences of other European countries, and policies for closer home, school and community co-operation. An EEC-funded project in the early 1980s, 'The school and family in the European Community', suggested that politicians, educators and parents themselves often assumed that home-school partnerships could be achieved by simple strategies. The Conservative government, via the 1986, 1988 and 1993 Education Acts, has encouraged parents to regard themselves as consumers in an educational market and as managers via representation on governing bodies.
