Geographies of education: family, parenting and schools

Abstract

Schools are central to the everyday geographies of parents as well as children, and have become a ‘new’ space through which family policy is executed and families targeted and appraised. Increasingly, schools have sought to influence children and young people’s behaviour and achievement through work on/with their parents. This chapter focuses on the role of schools in educating parents, and uses the example of family learning in the UK as a prism through which to explore geographies of labouring and learning. It draws on a wide body of literature as well as on our own research conducted with providers of, and parents involved in, family learning programmes to illustrate a range of issues arising from the increased and expected participation of parents in schools and their children’s education in the UK. In particular, by tracing family and parenting policy in the UK and the increased professionalisation of parenting in recent years, we demonstrate how parent-school interactions are both gendered and classed, being clearly targeted at certain ‘types’ of families and parents. We argue that a focus on children’s learning and labouring must be placed within contemporary conceptualisations of family and linked to the learning and labouring of parents, and that specifically of mothers. Attending to the geographies of children’s formal and compulsory education thus requires a focus on the relationships between families, parents and schools, and their increasingly formalised and regulated links. Placing children within in the familial context is therefore necessary for a wider appreciation of current discourses of learning and labouring.