Parental involvement in multi-ethnic schools

Case Study 2: City Infants School
Parents and the school

In the second primary case study, we focus on City Infants School. Like Brook Primary, City had developed its own high expectations of children's attainment as well as explicit rules for their behaviour which are shared with children and their families, providing the conditions for learning to take place. However, it provided a different pattern of provision in many ways.

City was a school in change and development. It did not have the long and stable history of success which Brook was building upon, while the Infant School was also due to amalgamate with the separate Junior School, on the same site, in autumn 1997, under the Infant School Head. Joint staff development towards the amalgamation was taking place at the time of our study. We found a school actively constructing a new ethos, and the expectations of behaviour and standards of learning that were required within it. This was a successful school in the process of recreating itself.

To be successful, the Headteacher knew, it had to engage with the local community, to take parents and carers with it. It was also a school tackling the particular issues which arise in trying to meet the needs of children from refugee and asylum seeking families in the context of tight budgets and mounting external pressures. In this context, it placed an emphasis on developing unqualified support staff as a valuable resource.

City Infants is located in an inner city residential area, close to a busy main road and tube, railway and bus centres. In the main road there are a number of community advice centres and social clubs specifically for members of a number of different ethnic communities. Alongside these, there have more recently been added a number of new wine bars and restaurants catering for the young, privately-rented-flat dwellers moving into the community, which includes the tenants of council estates and the owner-occupiers of terraced houses. There are also a number of refugee or asylum seeking families, mainly Kurds and Somalis, as well as other displaced families, living in bed and breakfast type accommodation, sometimes over long periods, sometimes experiencing a succession of temporary homes.

Details of the school's ethnic mix, according to the school's own records for December 1996 and excluding the nursery data, were as follows:

The school's 1996 OFSTED report comments: "There is high unemployment in the area. There are a high number of social issues... The Headteacher has set out to create a school about and involving real people, where education is a partnership between home, school and community, in which staff have the highest expectations of all students and where social background is no excuse for accepting low standards." The percentage of free school meals is 57%, compared to the LEA average of 41%.

One feature of the school's success as a 'community school' is the fact that a number of the parents of children in the school had themselves attended City Infants in the past. The Headteacher was once herself a local resident, bringing up her family in the area (her own children had attended the school), and a number of the school staff live locally and their sons and daughters currently attend the school. The Headteacher told us: "I felt I had the opportunity to establish something here and create something in the community. At the heart of the community."

Another feature supporting the school's success is that the LEA made generous local pre-school provision. Most of the children attending the school had either attended the school's own nursery or one of the other local nurseries provided in the area. A further feature was the powerful influence of an LEA-funded facility for before and after school hours care provided for all ages in the extended day and holiday centre attached to the school. Working parents could bring their children here in the morning, before school, and know that they would be cared for at the end of the school day as well as in the school holidays.

Although the centre had been opened 20 years earlier, it was the much more recent amalgamation of the Nursery and Infant School with the extended hours provision facility which had steadily increased the school's intake. The play centre impacted directly on school provision because the staff at the centre were timetabled to work within the school classrooms as nursery officers during the school day. This provided continuity for the children, but also brought a deeper knowledge of the families and their circumstances into the school.

We were able to talk to a number of parents, both informally, and also by bringing together a small group of five parents and carers (four of them African-Caribbean and one white) and one (African-Caribbean) foster parent. The parents/carers felt strongly that all children were encouraged and supported to get to know their roots. "The children from minorities, they all feel important here, that's why they are excelling. Each one is just as important as the next person." Another black parent explained why she felt the school was so successful: "My daughter just started here this year. She has excelled here. It is the welcome - when we first arrived the Head and Nursery teacher were at the door, waiting for us. As I came in, my first impressions of the school, with all the images presented on the walls here, were overwhelming."

Parents and carers appreciated the high standards of presentation and behaviour expected of the children. One carer who had chosen the school for her foster child even though it meant coming across the LEA boundary commented especially on the importance of the uniform in creating a feeling of 'belonging'. Her child was proud to wear it, and she felt it made a difference to the way the children were seen walking to and from the school.

Parental knowledge and skills were recognised, valued and drawn on across the curriculum. A parent said: "If you've got the knowledge, she asks you to bring stuff in. This week in their topic on 'Communications', my son said, 'My mum knows sign language'. So I'm in on Monday now to demonstrate!" Another parent said: "From day one they let you know you can come in and help. You can turn up any morning and offer to help and they welcome you."

The school had an active parents' and community association, mainly involved in fund-raising for the school, but also operating as a pressure group where necessary, for example campaigning on secondary transition in the LEA. It met once a term.

The school was producing a booklet called Helping hands for teachers for parents who offer to support in the classroom, in collaboration with the association. In recent months efforts to extend committee membership to include more people from minority groups had begun to pay off, with the election of two African-Caribbean women as co-chair and treasurer.

"Parents feel as much part of this school as the children do," another parent explained. The school gave parents confidence in their right to "walk in and ask questions", something they felt they would now have to take on into the secondary schools their children went on to; even where those schools might not encourage parents' attempts to be involved.

However, City Infants School was also thought to make parents 'recognise their responsibilities', in relation to attendance, punctuality and homework: helping collect items for topic work or for the 'letter of the week' phonics table, for example, as well as for their children's behaviour. One black parent said: "We need to take responsibility for this as parents. We have to acknowledge that, yes, our children might bully. We can't just say 'He's not like this at home!' We have to come into school and find out how our children are doing."