Empowerment and State Education: Rights of Choice and Participation

Two separate discourses surround the involvement of parents in their children's education in schools. One is concerned with what is often referred to as 'parent power,' based on the conferment on parents of rights to a degree of choice and participation in respect of their children's education, a feature of legislative changes to the governance of state education that started with the Education Act 1980 and which, in part, rests on consumerist and liberal rights based notions. The other focuses on the home-school partnership ideal in which parents and schools have obligations to support each other in realising children's potential. Labour and Conservative 2005 general election campaigns included proposals to 'empower' parents. But social rights such as those in education, which are important to notions of citizenship, tend to be weak. This article concludes that over the past 25 years little power has been ceded to parents, individually or collectively, and that, in the case of rights of choice at least, any further empowerment seems unrealistic. Moreover, the principal mechanism of parental involvement, particularly since 1997, has been the enforcement of parental responsibility, a form of 'technology of citizenship'. The extent to which children hold participation and choice rights is also considered.