Does the way a school treats parents make any difference to the way parents respond to the school?

It is one of those things that generally just happens: the school has a way of liaising with parents, and very quickly it becomes the natural and obvious way of doing things, continued without much change from year to year.

And yet several analyses have shown that there are currently four different models that schools in the UK use when liaising and dealing with the parents of their pupils and students.

More to the point, the approach that a school adopts to dealing with pupils and students can have quite a profound effect on the way parents respond to and support the aims and actions of the school.

In short, the support that a school gets from the parents is dependent on the way the school treats the parents in the first place.

The view that there are four different ways in which parents can be dealt with by schools, and that this affects the way parents co-operate with the school, was originally set out in a lecture by Tony Attwood at the University of East Anglia.  This lecture has now been reproduced in a brief summary paper, and this is currently available for download free of charge.

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If you have any enquiries about the article, you can reach its author, Tony Attwood, via email at <a href=”mailto:Tony@hamilton-house.com”