Parents—Partners or Clients? A Reconceptualization of Home–School Interactions

Increasingly, there is advocacy for parents to be included in partnership roles with schools. Indeed, the term 'partnership' seems to have acquired the connotation of an ideal form of parent–school relationship. This paper argues that the notion of partnership, with its accompanying suggestion of equality as a framework for the complementary sharing of responsibilities, is problematical. Based on the findings from an in‐depth study of teacher leadership in three Hong Kong schools that involved as participants parents, teachers, and students, it is proposed that a more reasonable understanding of this relationship is that of a professional and client association, where both parents and teachers are aware of their responsibilities and that these responsibilities are at once both demarcated and shared according to that understanding. At the same time there is also a need for teachers and parents to concentrate on building more concrete links for consistent and regular teacher–parent communication, as significant student learning now takes place informally at home, via the Internet.