Excluded Parents: The deracialisation of parental involvement 1

The blanket assumption that all parents are the same, with the same needs, and that their children can be treated in the same way continues to prevail in parental involvement policy and discourse. With respect to ethnic minority parents, specifically, such an approach obfuscates the importance of tackling the nature and consequences of structural racism. This 'one size fits all' approach masks the complexity of needs, the roles that ethnic minority parents are playing or the constraints that impede their involvement. This article focuses on ethnic minority parents in order to address the deracialisation of parental involvement policies and to extend the critique of parental involvement discourses. The implications of these, with respect to the opportunities for ethnic minority parents to intervene on their children's behalf as part of their commitment to supporting their children's education, are discussed. The argument presented asserts that parental involvement policies are flawed in their failure to recognise the ethnic diversity amongst parents, together with institutional racism within the education system, and that the deracialised parental involvement that is on offer may in the long run contribute to widening the gap between the involved and the uninvolved - the achievers and the underachievers.