Maltese secondary school managers' perceptions and practice of parental involvement in curriculum enrichment

Abstract

Parental involvement in schools and in curriculum enrichment largely depends on the school managers' perceptions and guiding principles. The question is how Maltese secondary educational managers perceive parental involvement in the curriculum in their schools at present, and how they perceive it theoretically and ideologically. The research consisted of a questionnaire administered to the educational managers of all the 62 secondary schools in Malta and Gozo. It consisted of a number of open-ended, qualitative questions, and a number of closed quantitative questions together with a list of statements. Important themes that emerged from the questionnaire were further explored through interviews with ten randomly selected school managers. It emerged that at present the majority of school managers do not perceive parental involvement as participation in curriculum enrichment. Most of them think that teachers regard parental involvement in the curriculum as a threat to their professionalism. They believe that there should be structured training both for parents and for teachers and also for school managers for a policy of parental involvement to succeed. Some Maltese secondary educational managers strongly believe in parental involvement in the curriculum and this is already being implemented in current practice. The complex nature of the results, however, became evident when on a more theoretical/ideological level, the majority of the school managers stated that there should be parental participation in curriculum enrichment. The major limitation of this research was the single source of data gathering. These findings have important implications for the effective implementation of parental involvement in the curriculum. A theoretical project is presented for more structured parental involvement in Maltese schools.