If private education is to improve, parents need to become more demanding
HAVE you ever been frustrated by a lack of response from your children’s school? Has it made you wonder about your role in your child’s education and your rights as a consumer? With three children in private education in Nicosia, the question of parental rights in schools is never far from my mind.
In most EU countries there are, to a greater or lesser extent, regulatory systems, government bodies, laws, as well as well established models of good practice, which are all part of the system in place to protect parents’ rights. In private education, the market itself can also have a strong regulatory role, in as much as consumers are able to exert pressure on the marketplace. However, it seems obvious that where the market is small and parents are often scared to make demands of their children’s school, regulatory pressure is reduced: voting with your feet is only an option if you have somewhere else to go! In Cyprus there are a small number of private schools and far too many parents desperate to get into one.
All parents are consumers of education, whatever type of school they chose to send their children to. If we fail to recognise the importance of this, we simply let educational providers off the hook when it comes to the onerous task of applying allied concepts like transparency and accountability. Consumerism is a great thing because it empowers people: all schools now operate in an international market where they can be measured against global standards and internationally recognised models of good practice. These standards might as well not exist if parents are not aware of them or don’t use them.
Consumer education is simply a process in which objective information about products and services are communicated to prospective consumers, followed by a mutual exchange of benefits. Fundamental to this process is the idea that parents are equal partners in the process, with valuable ideas to contribute and a say in how the school is run. It seems that schools are getting away with dictating the rules, even when it comes to how kids behave out of school, and no system is in place to question standards. This is because parental input to school policy seems to have a ceiling on it: join the PTA and bake a few cakes or organise some fund-raising activities. I expect to be taken more seriously than that.
I don’t know how many times in Cyprus I have heard the view expressed from more than one school, “This is the way we do things, if you don’t like it, perhaps it isn’t the right school for you…” In other words, if you don’t like it, go somewhere else. Where, exactly? And if you chose a school then you must like something about it. Does that mean there is no room for improvement? Naturally schools prefer not to have to deal with the better informed consumer that makes demands for better quality. In a small place where reputations are built on gossip, any small admission of a chink in the armour could spread like wildfire, with disastrous consequences! Open criticism becomes disloyalty; and an opportunity for other parents to feel smug about their own choice of school.
It occurred to me recently, after a particularly acrimonious exchange with our school, yet again, just how little respect we were being given as parents and as consumers. I am a pain, not a valued customer. I have read and re-read the endless list of school rules and behavioural expectations given to us by the school (ten out of ten for transparency there), and have asked questions about the school’s commitment to their responsibilities; whatever they are. No response yet. My wide experience of schools here is that they are reluctant to tackle broader transparency issues and reply to questions they don’t like because it makes it too easy to criticise.
All schools are capable of sticking teachers (one has to trust that their qualifications stand up to scrutiny, not having the luxury of checking) in front of a bunch of kids. Now let’s talk about modern teaching methods, individual targets, differentiation, published lesson plans, policy documents, inspectors’ reports, and a set of accounts to see where your money is going? An enormous bill for fees is one thing but how do you judge what you are getting in return or what you can even expect? It is odd that one of the fundamental principles most parents try to instil in their children is the idea that along with rights come responsibilities, while the educators here seem to have divorced the two concepts completely: they have all the rights and parents have all the responsibilities.
What amazes me from talking to friends here are the number of stories of petty rules and violations of rights that go on all over the place. Have you ever heard of a head teacher cutting a pupil’s hair because it is too long, or suspending them because it is not quite short enough? Perhaps this has something to do with a lack of objective criteria for judging schools and an obsession with the way people look. One particularly absurd idea I have come across in Cyprus is that kids sporting long hair, baggy trousers and body piercings must be drug-addicted delinquents. Really?
Schools in the UK are legally required to do a lot of things, not least respond to parents. All schools are regularly inspected by a team of qualified government inspectors, including private schools. Reports are detailed and available for all to see on the internet. And if private schools want to be registered with the Department for Education and Skills, they must reach the same standards as state schools in terms of quality of education. This includes a number of indicators to do with the quality of teaching and learning; planning; ethos; health and safety; suitability of the staff; provision of information and procedures for handling complaints. All schools must have a board of governors and elected parent representatives with real powers.
The amount of misinformation that goes around here about what goes on in schools is worrying. One parent really irritated me with a lecture on academic standards at my kids’ school (how does she know?) and her kids’ school (how does she know?). When I asked how she had reached her conclusions, she looked at me blankly. It is quite simple: where are the results published? They’re not. Draw your own conclusions, is all I can say. Why is nothing published? Isn’t that a basic consumer right? Let’s not even talk about league tables.
Once when I visited a respected secondary school in Nicosia as a prospective parent and asked to look round, I was met with incredulity. I was told in no uncertain terms that people were queuing up to go to that school. Shock, horror! As it turns out, I have met a large number of parents who are happy to send their kids there on the strength of reputation and the fact that they went there themselves more than twenty years ago! That told me everything I needed to know. Apart from EU regulation, there is very little hope for an improvement in consumer rights in education here until we all become better informed, more demanding consumers.
