Published December 20, 2025
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Parenting for Schooling: Understanding the Everyday Impact of Parent Engagement on Families, Parents, and Schooling
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Parent engagement is promoted in educational policy and literature as being an effective mechanism for raising student achievement. This focus on school-based outcomes has emphasized school-directed modes of parent engagement; however, how these policy ensembles shape parents’ lives, family life, or home-school relations remains largely invisible in discussions of parent engagement. In this paper, we present research from an institutional ethnographic inquiry that explored the everyday experiences of Australian parents with children at school. We conducted semi-structured interviews with parents and school staff, and undertook analysis of school texts that were implicated in parent engagement expectations and school-home communications. Our findings illustrate how parents prioritized school requirements in ways that had a significant reorganizing effect on family life: parents were attempting to comply with requests to support their children’s assessments throughout the year, including on school breaks and on weekends. School texts powerfully re-structured everyday family life and parents’ subjectivity in new ways that were largely invisible to the institution. Our aim is to reconceptualize what is known about parent engagement and show how it has worked to orchestrate parents’ time and attention towards school goals (primarily, student achievement); and how this has reshaped family relations. Implications for parent engagement policy and future research are discussed.
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