Introduction

This chapter explores the interface between the family and one of our main public institutions. The introductory chapter pointed to the ways in which traditional notions of family life still tend to dominate public policy provision, being based, for example, on (gendered) understandings of the availability of family members to perform certain caring or socialisation functions. Families, as we have seen, are accepted as appropriate sites for the socialisation of children, but it is also clear that society, since the mid-19th century, has also taken the view that the family should not be left on its own to perform this function in so far as it is construed in terms of providing an appropriate education for children. Public institutions like schools have traditionally been seen as sites of hegemonic discourse, where public notions of appropriate childhood behaviour and good parenting, for example, are instilled through both the formal and the hidden curricula and through social relations between school and family members. The calculation of how far professionals could intrude on and determine the agenda of private family life, or how far families could retreat into the private territory of the family to evade professional demands and claims on their behaviour, makes fascinating reading over the last hundred and thirty odd years since the 1870 Education Act. Thus boundaries between families and school have often been identified as confusing, ambiguous and even dangerous. A combination of macro social trends and policy responses to perceived social problems in the last few years seems, however, to have altered the boundary conditions between state and family over schooling and makes this an area worth revisiting.

Perhaps most marked has been a shift whereby it is no longer appropriate for parents as proxy education service users to be merely passive recipients of service. Instead a normalising discourse now operates where active participation by parents is seen as key to children's success. The rhetoric of citizenship and the imperative to participate which had been evident in other policy areas (Peterson and Lupton, 1996) appeared in the UK Conservative government reforms of education in the 1980s and 1990s. These saw the ‘rebadging’ of education and other public service users (for example parents, not children, and patients) as consumers and signalled a growth in the marketisation of education (Ball, 1995; Dehli, 1996).