Parents? satisfaction with their child?s first year of school

Abstract

A group of university and vocationally educated parents (n=486) were requested to evaluate their satisfaction with their child’s first school year, and they were also asked to recall the positive and negative events from their child’s academic year. Both structured and open-ended measures consistently revealed that parents were quite satisfied with the functioning of their child’s school. Parents’ social–psychological distance from the school, as measured by their social positions in the education hierarchy, tended to structure parental satisfaction: the mothers, and especially the university-educated parents, indicated the highest level of satisfaction, and these groups emphasized both positive and negative recollections; the group farthest from the school turned out be the vocationally educated fathers. Our results highlighted the teacher: the recollections concerning the teachers were evenly distributed into positive and negative accounts, and negative recollections regarding teachers and home-school cooperation in particular affected parents’ overall satisfaction. The findings were discussed in terms of their implications for educational policy.