Konferenza Nazzjonali 20 ta' Ottubru 2001
Ghalliema u Genituri: Shubija jew Shab:
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Paper By Ms. Solveig Gaarsmand |
Democracy in schools
Malta, October 2001
Thank you very much for the invitation to come to Malta and tell about European Parents Association and parents influence and responsibility in school. It is a great honour for me to be here today and I'm very happy to be able to welcome Malta as an associate member in EPA.
First I'll give some information about European Parents Association (EPA). EPA represents over 100 million parents all over Europe. It is an association, which is neutral as to political or religious viewpoints. 21 nations are represented in EPA, either as full members or associates. Also EPA has both parents associations and parent-teacher's associations.
The structure of EPA is:
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The General Assembly (Rotterdam November 23-25, 2001)
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The Administrative Council - all countries represented
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The Executive Committee (President, 2 Vice presidents, 1 Secretary General, 1 Treasurer)
EPA works in Europe. It is EPA's mission:
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to work for partnership between the different partners in the educational system in order to ensure an educational community throughout Europe
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to be the spokesman of parents in educational policies and decisions in Europe. Thus EPA has sent a report on language learning and comments on the Life Long Learning paper to the EU Commission.
EPA's aims are:
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Work for high quality of education for all children
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Work for active participation of parents
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Ensure a dialogue between European parents
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Support partnership with teacher, heads, pupils, administration and authorities
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Encourage good educational practices and exchange of experiences between parents' associations
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Develop and promote training of parents on partnership in education
Through its net of associations EPA has an influence on both European, national and local level.
Our partners in education are Teachers', Pupils', Heads' Associations and other related associations. We have regular meetings with representatives of the Commission and the Parliament of the EU. We are in contact with OECD and UNESCO.
As a member of EPA you can expect:
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Website for information and debate (www.epa.be)
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Gathering and disseminating information
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EPA-INFO
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Newsletters
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Seminars
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Study visits
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Training courses
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Research on parent participation and partnership
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Participation in projects
EPA's Activity Plan
Parents and School
Parents have the responsibility of their children also when the children attend school. They expect the school of their children to provide them with qualified teaching in a good learning environment that can give the child a good motivation and feeling of success. The learning process of the child, which has already started at home, goes on in a partnership between parents and school - the life long learning has started.
Parents have a right and an obligation to be involved in the learning process of their child because they have the responsibility as parents. The question is how to fulfil the commitment to their child and to the school in a manner satisfactory to both child, school and parent in a good partnership. Parents and teachers are equal partners. Parents are experts in their child's everyday life whereas teachers are experts in teaching.
There are as many different ways to do this, as there are countries in Europe so it is not possible to give Europe as an example. Therefore I have been asked by Francis Borg to take Denmark as an example as it is the country I know most about as to school system and parental influence.
The Political Hierarchy
The political hierarchy is on national, municipality and school level.
On national level the first paragraph of the law says that parents and school must cooperate and further all schools must elect a board consisting of 7 parents (elected for four years), two members of the employees (mostly teachers), 2 pupils. They all have the right to vote. Besides the headmaster and the deputy/assistant attend the meetings of the board but they don't have the right to vote. The chairman of the board has to be a parent. The board usually meets once a month.
On national level there is an Education Act (1993) the curricular of which say what should be the contents of each subject and demand working with cross-curricular subjects and projects as well.
The board takes part in making the aims and the principles of the school, suggests the employment of new teachers and head for the school, and accepts the annual plan of activities and the teaching materials. It has a strong obligation to make the frame of a proper frame of the home-school partnership on each school.
The municipality has the financial responsibility. It can also initiate development of quality programmes in the municipality. To ensure the cooperation with the schools 2 annual meetings with the parents are demanded by law.
The relation between the school board and the parents is per tradition as follows:
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The board has two meetings with class parents a year with topics of interest to the parents (i.e. bullying, interdisciplinary projects).
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The class parents have a few meetings with the class teacher to plan meetings with all the parents of the class. The parents do not only have practical tasks. They are not only coffee and cake makers. It is important to have a dialogue between parents and teachers instead of a monologue from teacher to parents. A lot of the information which the teacher gives at those meetings can be written or sent by mail to parents instead of wasting parents' time with a lot of knowledge they forget when they leave the meeting because they have been overloaded with information.
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There are usually two meetings each year between all parents in a class and the class teacher and a few others, typically the math teacher. These meetings are meant to deal with the class as such.
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At the individual level there are two school-home conversations for each child. Before the conversation the parents and child have talked about subjects such as the well being of the child in school, its ability to cooperate, its effort with the subjects and its competences in math, language etc. In school the child and the teacher have discussed what the status of the child is now and what should be the future aims of the child. Very often the teacher and the pupil make a contract about the new aims, such as reading a book every week or improving its ability in hand writing or behaving better towards its class mates. In this way all partners are well prepared before the meeting concerning the individual child and the conversation has the form of a dialogue instead of a critical monologue from the teacher to the child and its parents.
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The use of log book and portfolio can also be of great help to prepare the annual conversations and keep parents well informed supportive of the child.
School start meetings
The above mentioned is the formal and to some extent ritual school-home relations which are practiced in most schools. An improvement to this is the introduction of school start meetings for parents when their child begins school. Parents cannot be expected to know what has changed in school since they were themselves pupils. They carry with them the notions of the school as it was more than 20 years ago. Many changes have been made since. Therefore it is important to open the school to new parents and tell and discuss with them what school is today and why these changes have been made. It is also important for parents and teachers to get to know each other, if not you cannot expect them to be able to be good partners. On these school start meetings teachers and parents get the opportunity to discuss and get to know each other and to express the expectations each partner has to the other.
It is very important to have equality between teacher and parents at these meetings so the teacher responsible of the class should not be the chair of the meeting. If so you build up a hierarchy instead of partnership. The meeting should end up in both partners listing what each partner is responsible of and what they must cooperate about. The list of expectations will make the partners aware of what they have agreed upon and make them feel responsible to one another as they have debated the list and thus got a sense of ownership.
Planning and evaluation
To improve the influence of parents and their possibility to be responsible parents of school children the agenda of the meeting between parents and teachers on class level can be to evaluate the past year and plan the coming year together. This does not mean that parents take over any command of the teaching but they can come up with ideas and they will be the basis of qualified discussions at the meeting and give parents a better understanding.
School leavers
When the pupils are about to leave school parents should be given the opportunity to be good advisers of their children as research has shown that parents are the main advisers in the choice of education. However, parents do not have enough knowledge about the variety of educations, which exists today. Here the school can be a great help in arranging meetings for parents to inform them about the possibilities. In this way the parents can obtain a better understanding of their child's situation and the society can avoid that young people regret the choices they make because of lack of proper advice from their parents.
Differentiated school-home relationship
It is of great importance to realise that not all parents at the same time have the same need of school-home relationship. Sometimes serious problems make it necessary to have more contact with the school than at other times. Parents need to know explicitly that it is right to contact school and be contacted by the teacher at other times than the ordinary meetings. Sometimes teachers might even contact parents to tell them positive things about their children and not only call or write when things go wrong!
The school should always show that to parents it is
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Open
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Cooperative
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Informative
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Willing to cooperate
School and Society
The Danish parallel to AKS has 90 % of all Danish school boards as members. It has a monthly magazine. Besides it produces a lot of information materials to both school boards and class parents to give them inspiration in their work. The association spends much time advising parents when they have problems either as individual parents or as members of the school board. Meetings and conferences are arranged regularly. It has close contact to the Ministry of Education and members of the Parliament, the Teachers Union, the Heads' Union and the Students' Union. Over the next to years School and Society runs a programme on school debate together with the Ministry of Education which has sponsored it with 1 mill. Euro. Further information can be obtained on its website www.skole-samfund.dk and www.skoledebat.dk and www.uvm.dk.
Conclusion
Parents and teachers must cooperate to give the child as good opportunities to learn as possible. They are partners in bringing up the child to become a good citizen. Therefore it is important to have a good legal basis of school-parent partnership and to have the will both as a parent and as a teacher and headmaster to cooperate - to the benefit of the child!
Solveig Gaarsmand
Vice president of EPA
solveig@gaarsmand.dk
+45 2343 6875
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