ABSTRACT
The relationship between teachers and parents, school and home, has always been a sensitive one in part due to the authority of both sites and both parties. In the historical dialectic of thesis and antithesis there have been periods of marked change in the relations between home and school, school and community. The golden age of spending and resourcing of education in Western countries was beginning to feel the bite of economic stringency and the efficiency of schools was becoming subject to closer scrutiny. The social and political architecture of schooling remains much more potent than the physical design of schools which, however progressive, or radical, has done little to conceal deeper lying social discrimination. A different interpretation of what is meant by the ‘open school’, is less concerned with aspects of design and structural features than with openness to new ways of thinking about the purposes, conduct and contexts of learning.
