Democratic parent engagement: Relational and dissensual

Abstract

In opposition to the discourse of silent compliance and the neo-liberal colonisation of voice, this article shares research with parents in an English primary school. Drawing on the work of Jacques Rancière and John Macmurray, the author argues that there is a need for a more relational but dissensual approach to parent engagement and voice, instead of parents being positioned by schools as support acts. Parent engagement, increasingly commodified over recent years within English school policy, has been relegated to responding to questionnaires, dutiful attendance of parents’ evenings, ensuring homework completion and choosing the correct school. Meanwhile, the social mobility agenda demands that parents inculcate aspirations in their children unquestioningly. Policies and pronouncements seek to ‘close the gap’ in attainment between the poorest children and their peers in England, Australia, the USA and other neo-liberalised countries. Hence a context is created in which parent engagement is now an exercise in creating ‘good’ pupils and successful economic beings. This article considers how parents have been rendered objects rather than agentic subjects within neo-liberal education systems and have lost their democratic voice. It concludes that there needs to be a reanimation of Dewey’s vision of education politics.