Meetings without Communication: a study of parents’ evenings in secondary schools

Writing on home‐school relations has tended to concentrate on helping teachers to encourage parents into primary schools, leaving the secondary sector and parents’ views relatively neglected. This article seeks to redress the balance, reporting on an ethnographic study of parents’ evenings at four secondary schools in Norfolk, seen from the perspectives of all those involved. Data were collected via in‐depth interviews with staff, parents and students, and by observation of the events. The findings indicate that the parents’ evening is a unique interactional event which creates a problematic interface between the power bases of home and school, concentrating on the assessment of a (frequently absent) individual. It seems that this assessment is often approached from different viewpoints and with different agendas. Rules of engagement and the roles of participants are confused, and this confusion is exacerbated by logistical constraints, and by the growing autonomy of the student.