School Management Support for Parental Involvement in Education

The role of parents in the education of their children is a factor which has been acknowledged as one of the contributors to learners' success in schools. In addition, the nature of parental involvement and the benefits thereof, have been sufficiently treated in the corpus on school improvement. The purpose of this paper is to probe the support that schools, through their School Management Teams (SMTs), provide to parents to enable them to be closely involved in their children's education. Seen through the lens of Epstein's model, parental involvement is conceptualized and related to school environments in diverse South African contexts. The model of parental involvement reveals six areas of involvement, namely, parenting, communicating, volunteering, learning at home, decision-making and collaborating with the community. Accordingly, parental involvement as defined by Epstein and the inherent support that schools should provide to parents, form the thesis of this paper. The paper concludes with a recommendation of implementing proactive strategies of parental involvement in education. [For the complete Volume 21 proceedings, see ED629259.]