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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 10 Hansard (24 September) . . Page.. 3248 ..

MS McRAE (continuing):

This is an extremely useful paper, both because it offers a very thorough summary of the types of programs that are currently in place to try to deal with literacy and because it is so honest about the difficulties of what I am talking about - the complexities of those connections. That is why I think that really the Government paper ought to be revisited and some further material added. To give you an example of what I am talking about, it says on page 19:

To date, the majority of programs focus on providing parents or community members with the means to assist children in developing school literacy practices without recognising the disjuncture that often exists between school and home literacy. Too often they fail to build on family literacy traditions or to recognise the difficulty some parents have in providing support for their children's literacy learning. This failure can exacerbate educational disadvantage.

That is at the heart of the problem of what is missing from the Government's paper. The P and C paper goes on to say:

Schools operating successful parent involvement programs can place the most disadvantaged children, who are left out by non-participation by parents, in an even worse position relative to their peers participating in the program. Typically, teachers only work with those parents who come into the school to talk to teacher and find out how they can help their children at home.

Then there is a quote:

Generally speaking the teachers preferred to work with enthusiastic parents who willingly entered the school and also were confident in their educational role. Those parents tended to give very positive feedback to the teachers who thus were encouraged to continue the program, even though it did little for the low-contact parents.

The paper goes on:

Even within parent populations in lower socio-economic areas major differences can emerge. Those parents who are more confident in their dealings with the school are more likely to respond to invitations from the school to participate in parent involvement programs.

School programs for parental involvement in literacy make substantial demands on parents to use literacy skills to support their children's literacy and educational development. They take for granted the ability of parents to read to their children. However, parents with ill-developed literacy skills find it difficult to provide the support parent involvement programs generally assume will be available in the home.

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