Parents matter more than the education system admits – Jonathan Ayling
New Zealand’s education debate too often begins in the wrong place. We talk as though education begins with the system rather than the family.
At a moment of major reform, with curriculum changes underway and a new qualification framework in development, we still speak as though education is simply something delivered by schools, designed by experts, and administered by officials.
If parents feature at all, they are mostly at the edges: to sign the forms, read the newsletter, attend the interview and trust the process.
But that gets the order of things dangerously wrong.
Years ago, while working as a political adviser in Parliament, I joined a briefing about the policy levers most likely to improve educational outcomes.
At one point, an expert remarked that no single variable mattered more than parental engagement. I asked what work had been done on the policy settings that might strengthen it. None, as far as she knew. Recently, I put the same question to another education policy expert. The answer was much the same.
That’s a problem. Parental involvement is not some soft extra to be considered once the serious decisions have been made.
Professor John Hattie’s work has consistently reinforced the importance of what happens beyond the school gate. His Visible Learning framework identifies parental involvement as a positive influence on student achievement and treats the home environment as a meaningful influence too. Common sense says the same thing: children do not arrive at school as blank slates for the system to shape.
Yet our policy conversation rarely goes there.
Parents are not spectators in a child’s education. They are the primary educators of their children in the deepest and most fundamental sense. This is both a moral and a practical truth. Long before a child enters a classroom, parents have already begun teaching them how to speak, behave, listen, persist, and understand the world. Schools matter enormously, but they do not replace that responsibility. They exist to support it.
That truth should shape education policy far more than it does.
Some will object that parents already have a voice through school boards. Formally, that is true. But a board does not make parents primary in education. It gives them a role in school governance. In practice, many parent representatives serve without much training, time or policy support. That can leave boards heavily reliant on the principal whose work they are meant to oversee. Boards matter, but they are no substitute for treating parents as central to education policy itself.
Instead, the education debate in New Zealand is conducted largely among professionals, officials, unions and academics. They all have their place. But none stands in the same relationship to a child as a parent does. A healthy education system should recognise that schools and institutions are there to reinforce, not weaken, the unavoidably formative role of parents.
That has practical consequences. It should affect how schools communicate with families, how reforms are consulted on, how curriculum change is explained, how attendance is enforced, how reporting is designed and how seriously the system treats the home-school relationship. The question policymakers should keep asking is simple: does this make it easier or harder for parents to understand, guide, and participate in their child’s education?
This gap is made worse by the fact New Zealand has no obvious equivalent of the parent-advocacy bodies found around the English-speaking world. In the United States, groups such as the National PTA and the National Parents Union help give parents an organised policy voice. In Britain, Parentkind plays a similar role, representing parent views to Government and agencies. Canada and Australia also have parent-facing advocacy and policy organisations working in this space. New Zealand, by contrast, has remarkably little of this at a national level.
When nearly everyone in education is organised except parents, policy will usually be shaped by the system’s priorities before the family’s.
Policy, of course, is not everything. A better system can make parental involvement easier, more respected and more consequential, but it cannot manufacture responsibility where it is absent. No initiative from bureaucracy, politicians, advisory groups or unions can bridge the gap left by a parent disengaged from their child’s formation. That is not first a policy problem. It is a cultural one and is often the clearest indicator of whether a child will thrive in their education or not.
Still, that is no excuse for a policy culture that too often behaves as though parents are peripheral. Too often, they are informed after the fact, reassured rather than seriously engaged and treated less as the first educators than as interested bystanders.
That is a mistake, especially when New Zealand’s educational performance has been slipping for years. In those circumstances, we should be asking not only what schools can do better, but whether policy has become too detached from the people most responsible for shaping a child’s habits, aspirations and seriousness about learning.
Schools can do much, but they cannot stand in for mothers and fathers. When a system treats parents as peripheral, it is not just making a policy error, it is denying the most basic reality of how children are formed.
Jonathan Ayling is a former chief executive of the Free Speech Union (NZ), an Act Party supporter and donor, and has worked as a ministerial staffer and senior Parliamentary advisor in both Government and Opposition.
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