Attainment - black and minority ethnic groups (UK)

Parental involvement

Parental involvement is considered key to children's high attainment (Plowden 1967; Desforges and Abouchaar 2003; DCSF 2007).

Auerbach (2007: 252) suggests that in the US Black 'parental involvement in education has been socially constructed to privilege White, middle-class norms and the expectations of educators' and that 'because teachers place a high premium on school-based involvement and that [Black working class parents] are less likely to come to the school than middle-class White parents teachers often assume that the former groups do not care about their children's schooling' (see also Lareau and Horvat, 1999). Furthermore she contends that such assumptions are 'rooted in deficit thinking and the discourse on "at risk"-ness [which] perpetuate the myth of uninvolved minority parents'. However, her literature review documented 'the many ways in which poor and minority parents value education, exhort their children to do well, have high educational aspirations, and respond to teachers' requests' (p. 253).

Similarly viewed as uninvolved (Plowden, 1967) Black parents in the UK have been found to be highly involved in providing additional support through private tutors and sending their children to schools which provide extra support (at weekends/evenings) in maths, English and science (known as supplementary/ complementary schools (Reay and Mirza, 2000; Maylor et al., 2006, 2013; Siraj-Blatchford, 2010). However, such involvement often goes unrecognised because Black parents are considered to have the 'wrong cultural' currency (Crozier, Reay & Vincent, 2005; Rhamie, 2007; Vincent et al.,2012).