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Parental Involvement:

Parents are a child's first and most lasting educators' (Primary National Strategy, 2004:5). This means that parental involvement has many positive effects on children. Some of the benefits of parental involvement for children are a significantly increased cognitive development, an improvement in the child's motivation, a stronger parent-child relationship and, of course, increased academic achievement (Kreider, 2000 cited in Hayes, 2004). Therefore, the role of parental involvement is to get parents to have a more active role in their children's education (Browne, 2001), and this can be done via many different approaches.

There are two kinds of parental involvement strategies. The first is school-based and includes running the library or book club/shop; help with school drama productions and listening to readers (Browne, 2001). Another kind of involvement is home-based and focuses on activities that parents can do with their children at home (Kenway, 1998). However, it has been observed that few teachers involve parents through home-based activities, partly because of the amount of time involved in developing activities and partly because of time constraints on parents. Furthermore, some parents are encouraged not to get involved with their children's learning, because the school knows best' (Whalley, 2001). This is often because practitioners see parents as unqualified and unable educators (Edwards and Warin, 1999). However, as stated previously, parents have the most influence over children enabling them to learn more effectively.

Issues with Parental Involvement:

For many parents, a major obstacle to becoming involved is lack of time (Kenway, 1998). Working parents are often unable to attend school events during the day. In addition, evenings are the only time these parents have to spend with their children, and they may choose to spend time with their family rather than attend meetings at school. This was noted while on placement. It was obvious that a lot of the children at home time were not collected by their parents, but grandparents and after school club workers. One child in particular was known to be parted from parents from eight in the morning till six at night. This would make parental involvement almost impossible.

Some parents may have trouble with transport (Kenway, 1998). This meaning that they do not have their own vehicle and furthermore, the school may not be on a bus route. This was one problem with the school on placement.

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