Parental Involvement in Children’s Schooling and Learning in the School, Home and Community in Rural India.

Abstract

Empirical research from rural India demonstrates that less affluent parents are less likely to engage in activities that support their children’s schooling and learning, than their wealthier counterparts. School actors and community leaders often attribute this to parents living in poverty being unaware of, or simply indifferent to, their children’s educational needs. However, mothers from these less affluent groups maintain that lower levels of parental support to children’s education result from the poverty-related challenges they face, such as time and resource constraints. This thesis employs data from a low-resource community in rural Uttar Pradesh, India, to consider the association between five parent-level factors and parental involvement and participation in activities supporting children’s schooling and learning within the school, home, and community. Using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) for samples of between 9,000 and 19,000 parents, analyses suggest that each of these five factors may be associated with parental involvement and participation in these activities. However, the extent of these associations differ according to the context within which the activity takes place, such as the school, home, or community. Parents’ perception of outreach from school actors, for example invitations to visit the school from teachers or headteachers, is significantly associated with parents’ involvement in activities based at the school. Parents’ level of education, on the other hand, is associated with their children’s education in the home. Analyses show that parental perceptions of school outreach is also significantly associated with parents’ participation in school-related intervention activities. Parents’ level of education and perception of the time they have available to support children’s education, are also linked to their participation in home- and community-based activities that were implemented as part of an education-focused intervention in rural Uttar Pradesh. These findings could inform discourse around why parents become involved in activities that support their children’s schooling and learning, or their education more broadly. However, Multi-Group Structural Equation Modelling (MGSEM) analyses show that household wealth also appears to influence which factors matter most for parents’ involvement or participation in such activities in rural India, even in a relatively economically homogeneous community. For instance, parents’ perception of school outreach may be more influential for less affluent parents’ school-based involvement, than for their wealthier counterparts. Conversely, parents’ perception of the time they have available to support the child’s education appears to exert greater influence on more affluent parents’ home-based involvement. In terms of participation in activities associated with an intervention, analyses suggest that although more and less affluent parents participate at similar rates, they may become engaged in the intervention for different reasons. More specifically, n cases where disparities exist in how these five parent-level factors are linked between less affluent and more affluent parents, the analyses suggest that the influence of these factors on more affluent parents was notably stronger. These overall findings suggest that household poverty continues to exacerbate inequalities in terms of how and why parents become involved in their children’s education in rural India. This thesis will provide stakeholders with a more nuanced view of the factors that may influence their involvement or participation in interventions, and the moderating role that household wealth plays. In deeply engaging with this relationship, it is hoped that educationalists will be able to account for parental involvement and intervention participation-related differences among wealth groups, to strengthen parental support for low-achieving children. Considering that recent evidence shows that children in resource-constrained areas in the Global South benefit disproportionately from their parents’ involvement in their education, this could be a potential route through which we improve learning outcomes for the most disadvantaged in post-COVID, rural India.