Education planners now recognise that parental involvement is necessary to guarantee transparent and democratic administration in schools. In 2003, Peru’s Congress formally committed the country to ensuring parental participation. However, parents and teachers are unsure about their roles.

Parents, particularly those from more disadvantaged backgrounds with little or no formal education, know little about how learning takes place in schools or how they could support their children’s learning. At the same time, teachers and schools often lack appropriate strategies to inform and guide parents about their children’s learning and about appropriate ways to support them. Until recently, there has been no strategy to engage parents in raising the quality of education.

Research from the Young Lives Project, in the UK, discusses the findings of a study on families’ and teachers’ understanding of parental involvement in public primary schools in Peru.

Peru has prioritised parental participation for political and administrative reasons, rather than pedagogical reasons. Education authorities focus on the need to democratise decision-making in order to guarantee more transparent resource management – such as parental oversight of school expenditure – or to get parents involved in improving school infrastructure and fundraising.

Evidence from international assessments reveals the extremely low quality of education in Peru and the size of the gap between curriculum expectations and children’s achievement. In one study on achievement, Peru came last of 41participating countries. A national survey in 2004 showed that by the end of their primary education, only about 12 percent of students achieve expected reading comprehension levels and only about eight percent in mathematics. Parents are mostly unaware of the low quality of the education that their children are getting.

The 2003 education law is progressive. It emphasises the need to consult children and their parents, seeing government and citizen co-management of education as a way of promoting democratic decision-making and decentralisation following the end of authoritarian rule in 2000.  However, as in other countries with similar legislation, understanding of community involvement and participation is limited.

Young Lives researchers found that:

• Few parents know how to help their children, especially those from poorer backgrounds who have had little formal education.
• Many parents are surprised when they find their children have to repeat a school year, as are the children themselves.
• Parents of higher achieving children are more aware of the importance of supporting children at home, although they could get more guidance on how to do this.
• Schools offer little information to parents about curricular and pedagogical issues and they rarely guide parents on how to support their children’s learning in school.
• Teachers get no advice from the education ministry on how to work with parents to improve children’s performance.

Schools make unrealistic time and financial demands on parents. This can stop parents from coming to schools. Educationalists need to ask whether it is realistic to expect parents of low achievers to participate in school affairs in ways that schools would like, in view of their widespread poverty and daily struggle to overcome health and nutritional problems.

Education planners should:

• realise the gap between the views of families and schools
• understand the need for schools and teachers to stop blaming achievement problems on home-related factors and alleged parental lack of interest in education
• allow parents to become active participants in the construction of knowledge about how to support their children at home
• analyse how poverty imposes barriers on ‘home to school’ communication and promote programmes to address this problem
• ensure parents are not only invited to participate in fundraising and social events, but that they become more aware of what school learning is about and how they can contribute to it
• learn from, and share good practice, from successful parental associations.

Source(s):
‘The Quality of Parental Participation and Student Achievement in Peruvian Government Schools’, Young Lives Working Paper 35, University of Oxford, by Maria Balarin and Santiago Cueto November, 2007 (PDF) Full document.
‘Promoting Educational Reforms in Weak States: The case of Radical Policy Discontinuity in Peru’, Globalisation, Societies and Education, 6 (2), pages 163–178, by Maria Balarin, 2008 Full document.

Funded by: K (DFID

id21 Research Highlight: 3 August 2008

Further Information:
Young Lives
Department of International Development
University of Oxford
3 Mansfield Road
Oxford OX1 3TB
UK

Tel: +44 1865 289966
Fax: +44 1865 281801
Contact the contributor: younglives@younglives.org.uk

Young Lives, Department of International Development, University of Oxford, UK

Maria Balarin
Department of Education
University of Bath
Bath, BA2 7AY
UK

Tel: +44 1225 385111
Fax: +44 1225 386113
Contact the contributor: M.Balarin2@bath.ac.uk

Department of Education, University of Bath, UK

Santiago Cueto
Grupo de Análisis para el Desarrollo (GRADE)
Av. del Ejército # 1870
Lima 27
Perú

Tel: + 51 1 2641780
Fax: +51 1 2641882
Contact the contributor: scueto@grade.org.pe

Grupo de Análisis para el Desarrollo (GRADE), Lima, Perú

Other related links:
'Gender, language and inclusion'

'Ignoring the world’s youngest children makes no sense'

'Bolivia revolutionises bilingual education '