Parents as ‘customers’? The perspective of the ‘providers’ of school education. A case study from Germany

Disrupting conventional conceptions of parental engagement: Insights from international schools

“…Seen this way, parental aspiration is inextricably entangled with international education, financial investment and social mobility. We fully recognise that the parent-consumer (Angus, 2015) has expectations about the products of an international education that include, but may not be limited to, educational outcomes, but we argue that this representation of the parent is simplistic; it can be contested when the perspectives of staff are introduced (Breidenstein et al, 2020), particularly where they are seen as middling actors.…”

“…Competition is played out in local, not global, contexts that are strongly influenced by regional and national cultural, religious and policy factors. Indeed, in the context of the school choice literature, parents are framed as responsiblised actors who choose international schools as desirable alternatives to 'local' schools (Breidenstein et al, 2020;Lee et al, 2021;Proctor et al, 2020). Thus, parent-consumers are framed as simultaneously shopping for education in local markets and global markets, with local schools appearing relatively less desirable compared to the international trajectories marketed by international schools.…”

“…Although there is some understanding about how class advantage plays out in international education to re/produce social elites (Hayden et al, 2020;Maxwell et al, 2018;Tarc and Tarc, 2015), there is debate, in the context of school choice, as to the impact this has on the conventional conception of the school/parent relationship that schools dictate practices of parental engagement. Some argue that this is destabilised when parents are framed as 'customers' in the education market (Angus, 2015), while others argue that teachers in a marketised sector still maintain the balance of power by virtue of their professional status as educators (Breidenstein et al, 2020). The particularities of the international school/ parent relationship have yet to be considered within this debate.…”

Great expectations: migrant parents and parent-school cooperation in Norway

“…2 On the Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training's homepage, 3 cooperation between school and home is promoted because 'Parents and supervisors have the main responsibility for their own children, and they have a great influence on their motivation and learning outcomes'. Further, the increased role of parents within the educational system can also be understood as pertaining to the introduction of the citizen as client, brought about by the neoliberalisation of society (Baeck 2010b): parents are viewed as consumers with rights who expect the promised quality of the goods they are given (Baeck 2015;Breidenstein, Krüger, and Roch 2020).…”

Structure-reinforced privilege: educational inequality in the Singaporean primary school choice system

“…This critique of parents, while important, risks minimizing the important way choice systems are designed to enable parents disproportionate access, specifically the number of choices and the way that school enrollments are structured. Some research has examined this interaction as policymakers have responded to the transformation of parents as "customers" (Breidenstein, Krüger and Roch 2020) in some instances by increasing elite schools such as in the Netherlands, although the research focus thus far has been on the school choices rather than the design of the choice system (Merry and Boaterman, 2020).…”