Parental involvement in Cypriot primary schools

The study investigated parental involvement in children’s learning in Cypriot primary schools. It aimed to describe and analyse processes of policy-making and capture meanings, interpretations and reported practices of major stakeholders through document analysis, survey and interviews with élites, teachers, parents and children. The policy trajectory framework of Bowe et al. (1992) identified three interactive contexts influencing the stages of development, interpretation and enactment of policy. The adoption of this framework as a tool of analysis, contributed to the significant findings of the study. Indeed, investigation of the parental involvement policy-to-practice process provided the opportunity to identify both facilitating factors and obstacles restricting its development. Overall, the study identified the sheer political challenge associated with setting up a new educational system, translating new ideas and conceptions into an agreed text and practical challenges related to lack of professional teacher development in parental involvement, as well as ideological tensions related to relinquishing traditional professional boundaries set by teachers and psychological barriers associated with perceived threats from parental interference. The study indicated that the Cypriot educational system is in the early stages of developing parental involvement policy. It identified a weak interaction between policy contexts. The absence of mechanisms for transmitting new policies to practitioners, lack of guidance on implementation or monitoring of this process allowed headteachers and teachers to determine the type and extent of parental involvement practised. Even though findings indicated that there was an implicit recognition from teachers, parents and children of Cypriot parents’ central role in their children’s education and development, there was a lack of explicitly promoted parental involvement practices. The mismatch between policy intention, text and practice allowed the emergence of a dominant parent group whose disproportionate influence through Parent Associations seemed to be derived from the particular social and cultural capital background they occupied.