Empowerment and State Education: Rights of Choice and Participation

Abstract

Two separate discourses surround the involvement of parents in their children's education in schools. One is concerned with what is often referred to as ‘parent power,’ based on the conferment on parents of rights to a degree of choice and participation in respect of their children's education, a feature of legislative changes to the governance of state education that started with the Education Act 1980 and which, in part, rests on consumerist and liberal rights based notions. The other focuses on the home‐school partnership ideal in which parents and schools have obligations to support each other in realising children's potential. Labour and Conservative 2005 general election campaigns included proposals to ‘empower’ parents. But social rights such as those in education, which are important to notions of citizenship, tend to be weak. This article concludes that over the past 25 years little power has been ceded to parents, individually or collectively, and that, in the case of rights of choice at least, any further empowerment seems unrealistic. Moreover, the principal mechanism of parental involvement, particularly since 1997, has been the enforcement of parental responsibility, a form of ‘technology of citizenship’. The extent to which children hold participation and choice rights is also considered.

Local Authorities and the Accountability Gap in a Fragmenting Schools System

“…There were clear advances in parental participation rights, for example, in parental representation on school governing bodies and local admission forums; the right to vote on a school's selective admissions arrangements; and the right to have any expressed views taken into account by the school's governing body and, in relation to the local authority's general duty to ensure that there are ‘sufficient schools’ in the area, the local authority. Yet, as discussed in a previous article, in relation to neither these rights nor the enhanced democratisation of choice within the state system does one see any evidence of a significant power shift towards parents. Nevertheless, parental involvement was consistent with New Labour's partnership and community‐orientated approaches to education, and has a renewed relevance under the present government's aim of facilitating local community initiative (discussed below).…”

Children changing spaces, changing schools

“…Children and their communities rarely have opportunity to direct or change what happens in school classrooms, especially in the United Kingdom where participation rights remain controversial (Fielding & Moss, 2011;Harris, 2005;Horgan et al, 2017). Education research tends to consider the child as learner in preparation for adulthood, and the teacher as instrumental to this process, but seldom their relationships, or the effects of generational order.…”

“…Children should learn to live peacefully and protect the planet on which we all rely (Article 29). Thus, education is about both socialisation and individual growth, enabling children to flourish as active members of communities in the now, as well as in the future, and reinforcing citizenship (Harris, 2005;Johnson & Johnson, 2016).…”

“…Complex connections between education and democracy, about which Dewey wrote a hundred years ago, tend to be obscured by the 'neoliberal' drive to standardise education systems-indeed to standardise children, to maintain a globally dominant economic system (Bath et al, 2020;Fielding & Moss, 2011;Harris, 2005;Sahlberg, 2011). Global education reform has driven competition and personalisation in schools, with children expected to attain ever higher targets, to satisfy wealth generation structures, reducing opportunities for broader learning and maintaining inequalities (Fielding & Moss, 2011;Sahlberg, 2011).…”

From the Social Contract to a Social Contract Law - Forms and Functions of Administrative Contracts in a Fragmented Society - A Continental View

“…Thus, more Cantons like Valais85 and Basle-Land 86 use the contract on social welfare. Harris, for example, shows that school principals in Great Britain increasingly contract with unruly students, before resorting to order and enforcement measures 87.…”