Parents are welcome: headteachers’ and matrons’ perspectives on parental participation in the early years

Parental participation has been at the centre of policy initiatives on the education of the young child since the 1960s with the compensatory programmes of Head Start in the United States and Educational Priority Areas in the United Kingdom. With these initiatives, equality and partnerships were to be achieved through parent participation. However, as Valentine and Stark [1979], commenting on experiences in the U.S.A., remark, “An exclusive emphasis on parent education has come to dominate the Head Start parent involvement component” [p. 311]. In the U.K. there continues to be much talk of “parents as partners” (Atkin, Bastiani, & Goode, 1988; Smith, 1984). Yet, in a study which we conducted in 1989 (Burgess, Hughes, & Moxon, 1989a), we found that parent education formed a major element of parental involvement in the education of children under 5.