Geographies of Education: Families, Parenting and Schools

Geographies of education: families, parenting and schools

Elodie Marandet and Emma Wainwright*

Centre for Human Geography

Brunel University London

Uxbridge UB8 3PH

* Corresponding author

Abstract

Schools are central to the everyday geographies of parents as well as children, and have become a ‘new’ space through which family policy is executed and families targeted and appraised. Increasingly, schools have sought to influence children and young people’s behaviour and achievement through work on/with their parents. This chapter focuses on the role of schools in educating parents, and uses the example of family learning in the UK as a prism through which to explore geographies of labouring and learning. It draws on a wide body of literature as well as on our own research conducted with providers of, and parents involved in, family learning programmes to illustrate a range of issues arising from the increased and expected participation of parents in schools and their children’s education in the UK. In particular, by tracing family and parenting policy in the UK and the increased professionalisation of parenting in recent years, we demonstrate how parent-school interactions are both gendered and classed, being clearly targeted at certain ‘types’ of families and parents. We argue that a focus on children’s learning and labouring must be placed within contemporary conceptualisations of family and linked to the learning and labouring of parents, and that specifically of mothers. Attending to the geographies of children’s formal and compulsory education thus requires a focus on the relationships between families, parents and schools, and their increasingly formalised and regulated links. Placing children within in the familial context is therefore necessary for a wider appreciation of current discourses of learning and labouring.

Key words

Education, Families, School, Parenting, Policy, UK

Introduction

In recent years, parenting has become a key area for policy intervention (Gillies, 2005), whether through explicit classes aimed at ‘improving’ parenting skills (Vincent and Warren, 1998) or enhancing home-school relations with parents as ‘active partners’ in their children’s education (McNamara et al, 2000; Cullingford and Morrison, 1999; O’Brien, 2007). Crucially, parents, and especially mothers, are to be engaged in the work of both production and social reproduction, with the ‘double shift’ of paid employment and care now a normative expectation (Smith et al, 2011). Successive UK Governments have thus placed family and parents at the forefront of various policy initiatives, with the traditionally private sphere of the family repositioned as a thoroughly public space (Fairclough, 2000) worthy of close examination and involvement. Parenting has become a key area for policy intervention, most notably in relation to education, and formal education has been framed by increasingly structured and regulated links to home and family.

In geographical literature, while home has been given extensive treatment (Blunt and Dowling, 2006), Valentine (2008) has been alert to the ‘absent presence’ of family. Harker (2010) notes that family has often been ‘forgotten’ or ‘bracketed out’ from research, with family and family spaces often playing a supporting role to other geographies, notably those focusing on intimacies, relationships and social reproduction. Yet ‘Children’s Geographies’ in particular would benefit from moving beyond the ‘all-knowing child’ (Holloway, 2014) to consider the contexts and concepts of family and parenting. This has been somewhat redressed in recent years, for example with interest in familial relations and spaces (Harker and Martin, 2012) and particularly in parenting (Jupp and Gallagher, 2013). This chapter seeks to focus specifically on family and parenting in relation to education, and in particular on children’s formal and primary education in the UK, highlighting how government has sought to influence children and young people’s behaviour and achievements by working on/through family, and especially parents. The chapter starts with an account of family learning programmes and our research on family learning, which forms the basis of this paper. It then traces more general social policy interventions aimed at family and parenting in recent years in the UK. The rest of the paper highlights the pertinence of family learning to explore the relationship between education, families, parenting and schools, with consideration of the professionalization of parenting, and the gendering of parents’ involvement in, and the targeting of certain ‘types’ of parents through, schools. The chapter then finishes with reflections on neoliberal parental expectations of caring, learning and labouring, and emphasises that children’s learning and (future) labouring is tied explicitly to that of their parents.

Family learning

Family learning has become an important mode of education deployed by governments in the UK over the past 20 years. It refers to formal programmes, normally run in schools and nurseries, which are aimed at engaging parents in tackling educational under-achievement (DfES, 2003), encouraging family members to learn together and pursue further learning. It is normally comprised of two strands: Family Learning Literacy, Language and Numeracy (FLLN) and Wider Family Learning. The former has been linked closely to the Labour Government’s (1997-2010) Skills for Life (DfEE, 2001) strategy and the recent Coalition Government’s (2010-2015) Skills Investment Strategy (BIS, 2010), and is targeted at parents and children with basic skills needs. The latter, although it may contain elements of FLLN, has been linked to a broader agenda of widening participation, community capacity-building and neighbourhood renewal and regeneration. Family learning is therefore positioned at the nexus of a number of social policy areas with a focus beyond education, and draws on normative versions of family roles and responsibilities.

In this chapter, we draw on already published findings from a qualitative research project which explored ‘the meanings of work, learning and motherhood in family learning’, and which had the broad objective to examine the various themes and issues arising from family learning programmes and problematise the targeting and involvement of parents through schools (Wainwright and Marandet, 2011 and 2013). The project was conducted in West London and entailed three key fieldwork stages. Stage 1 consisted of 16 in-depth interviews with key stakeholders, such as Local Education Authority lifelong learning managers, family learning tutors and local training advisors. Stage 2 involved three focus groups with a total of 33 women engaged in family learning in Acton, Kenton and Hounslow. Locations were chosen on the advice of stakeholders and agreement of tutors, and points to the spatial targeting of family learning policy. The focus groups were conducted in the respective learning venues of local authority funded nursery, learning centre adjacent to a primary school and community centre, reflecting the variety of venues used to accommodate these council-funded courses. The sample of mothers were taking a range of courses in wider family learning (including music and movement, arts and crafts and a course called ‘strengthening families and communities’) and FLLN classes. Participants ranged in age from early 20s to mid-40s and, importantly, only two of the three 33 women were White British. The others self-identified as Indian (13), Sri Lankan (2), Black African (8), Black Caribbean (1), Arab (3), Mixed/ other background (2), Other Asian (2). Many of the women explained that they were recent immigrants to the UK, a reflection both of the transient West London population and those participating in/ targeted for family learning in this area. From the focus groups one-to-one and paired-depth follow-up interviews were conducted with a sample of 10 focus group participants to enable more personal and detailed discussions of issues considered and evoked during stage 2. In the qualitative data we draw on here, we use numbers to identify different family learning providers and pseudonyms for those mothers with whom we conducted in-depth interviews. Due to difficulties identifying individual voices, mothers in the focus groups are not separately named but identified by group location.

Notably, in spite of efforts to include more fathers in family learning, programmes are dominated by women, and particularly by mothers. Motherhood is acknowledged as a crucial defining aspect of many women’s lives and identities yet, at the same time, it carries a number of (often problematic) normative prescriptions (Gregson, 1999; Holloway, 1998). Though the role and place of ‘mother’ in relation to the family are contested (Walby, 1990; Aitken, 1999), a normative maternal discourse still constructs mothers in relation to their children and prescribes them as the main carers and educators of them. The overwhelming number of women compared to men who participate in family learning demonstrates the continued and extensive gendered division of labour operating in the home and through families, especially in relation to educational work, and points to education as a means through which more traditional familial arrangements and expectations are reproduced (Reay, 1998). But with more women expected to (re)enter paid employment after childbirth, society’s understanding of a mother’s role and place has shifted and this extends to an expectation that they should be working for pay as well as caring (Wainwright et al, 2011). Motherhood has become a discursive identity framed round both production and social reproduction, and this is added to and complicated through the expectations placed on parents by schools in relation to children’s learning. Drawing on the example of family learning is therefore timely for exploring these concurrent and problematic positions and, through reflection on the geographies of education that bind together school and home, effectively highlights the ways in which education is being used to (re)focus family life and (re)shape the role of parents as educators, economic actors and citizens.

Family and parenting policy in the UK

Although the interest of policymakers in the relationship between parents and their children is not new (Rose, 1989), the Labour Government precipitated and legitimized a more direct and far reaching role for the state in regard to family and parenting (Daly, 2010) with both pushed to the forefront of various policy initiatives. This focus stemmed in part from a ‘social investment perspective’ which views improvement to children’s upbringing and education as a way of reducing future costs through early intervention (Giddens, 1998; Esping-Andersen, 2002; Jenson and Saint-Martin, 2006; Lister, 2003). Following the ‘third way approach’ (Giddens, 1998), families and communities have increasingly been viewed as crucial in shaping suitable and active citizens.

Policy interventions have been influenced by medical and psychological research that has problematized parental practices in terms of their impact on children’s development and behaviour (Daly, 2013) and educational achievement (Clark, 2007). This idea has led to the adoption of the view that the parent/child relationship is ‘the most critical influence on a child’s life’ (Her Majesty’s Treasury, 2003: 39). Indeed, the intergenerational legacy of educational achievement, marshalled through a discourse of social mobility, has been prominent in UK Government policy in recent years (Brown, 2008; HM Government, 2009 and 2011). As a result, the focus on children and their education has been extended to parents and their parenting competence (Gambles, 2013). It is also worth noting that this policy interest has developed in a context of public anxiety about parenting and families, marked by a perceived crisis of childhood and the development of popular literature and entertainment programmes on ‘how to parent’ (Gambles, 2013; Daly 2013).

The idea of teaching parents to do a ‘better’ job has gained increased prominence and is now almost de rigueur in contemporary social policy. The creation in 1998 of Surestart spearheaded the development of parent-oriented programmes and was followed by the establishment of Children’s Centres. Although parenting programmes were initially designed for parents whose child(ren)’s behaviour was perceived as inappropriate, they soon became part of a much larger package of ‘parenting support’, a term which, as Lewis (2011: 107) articulates ‘gives expression to the state’s desire to work ‘in partnership’ with parents’.

The role of parenting in engendering a culture of learning has been central to policies such as Every Child Matters (DfES, 2003) and Every Parent Matters (DfES, 2007). From 2006 all local authorities were required by law to assess parenting related need in their area and put in place appropriate services including education programmes but also parenting practitioners and a parenting service commissioner. By 2010, access to parenting programmes had become universal on a voluntary basis while parents of children whose behaviour was seen as problematic could be requested to attend. The UK now has one of the most expansive parenting programmes in the EU (Daly, 2013), some of which is run through family learning classes or in/through schools. Indeed, it is often through schools that certain ‘types’ parents are recruited to family learning classes (Wainwright and Marandet, 2013) as we discuss later. Family learning, as well as other parenting support interventions, have been included in the ‘re-envisioning’ of the role of and services offered by schools (Daly 2013). Primary schools are now sites where families are identified for early intervention and where parenting skills can be moulded (Holloway and Pimlott Wilson, 2014).

Parenting support is considered a valuable type of policy intervention but also a means of addressing a myriad of issues including child poverty, social mobility and antisocial behaviour (Daly 2013) as well as parents’ own learning and employability. This latter element has been particularly targeted through family learning. In 2001, the Government Green Paper The Learning Age described family learning as “a vital means of improving adult literacy and numeracy” but noted that “it also fosters greater involvement between children, their parents and their communities at all levels” (DfEE, 2001: 31). In this context, participation in family learning has been aimed at encouraging parents to partake in their own children’s learning and develop their parenting skills whilst encouraging their own personal development and economic and social futures.