Abstract
Home-school relations, home learning and parental engagement are prominent educational policy issues, constituting one aspect of a wider parenting support agenda that has suffused the landscape of social policy over the last two decades. This article examines a parenting support initiative distinctive for its use of link workers in mobilising ‘hard to reach’ parents to engage more effectively with their children’s education. Drawing on qualitative data gathered during the evaluation of the initiative, the article frames link worker–parent interactions as a form of everyday government and pastoral power. Link workers constitute a new educational pastorate; through friendship, care and control they exercise pastoral power over parents. Building on recent research into the role of ‘pastors’ in producing neoliberal subjectivities within the National Health Service, the article foregrounds their efforts to foster responsible, self-disciplined agency in parents. Link workers, it is argued, contribute to a responsibilisation and pedagogicalisation of the family, which has produced new figures of mothering/parenting, reconfigured the meaning of the home and extended the scope of state intervention into family life.
Highlights
Home-school relations, home learning and parental engagement are prominent educational policy issues, constituting one aspect of a wider parenting support agenda that has suffused the landscape of social policy over the last two decades (Daly 2015)
As accountability for children’s future outcomes shifts from the state to the family, concern for the adverse environmental conditions affecting families’ lives has been displaced by interventions aimed at renovating parenting practices and behaviours as a means of resolving long-standing social inequalities. This has given rise to a new class of paraprofessionals across the social policy domain who are tasked with encouraging desirable parental behaviours and promoting the power of ‘good’ parenting as capable of mitigating social disadvantage (Daly 2015; Gillies et al 2017; Lee et al 2014)
The link workers in this study constituted a particular rendering of the parenting support agenda within the field of education
Summary
Home-school relations, home learning and parental engagement are prominent educational policy issues, constituting one aspect of a wider parenting support agenda that has suffused the landscape of social policy over the last two decades (Daly 2015). Data were gathered from the two link workers across a series of extensive interviews over the course of the pilot, and the decision to focus almost exclusively on their perspective in this article was motivated by the aim of exploring as fully as possible how link workers construct, rationalise and understand their role, thereby providing a rich, detailed insight into their self-conceptualisation and the strategies they devised to deliver on their aims With this in mind, it is not the intention here to enter into detailed discussion of the experiences of other stakeholders in the project (e.g., parents). Service (Waring and Martin 2016), the article foregrounds link workers’ efforts to foster responsible, self-disciplined agency in parents The link workers, it is argued, contribute to a responsibilisation and pedagogicalisation of the family, which has produced new figures of mothering/parenting, reconfigured the meaning of the home and extended the scope of state intervention into family life.
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