Parent–practitioner engagement in early education and the threat of negative thinking about the poor across England and the USA

Abstract

Parent-practitioner engagement in the early years has become a key policy in remediating the negative effects of poverty upon children's early educational outcomes. Although this approach is shared across several developed countries there has been limited attention upon how practitioners think about poverty and their engagement with parents in poverty. Our mixed methods study in England and the USA provides rare evidence addressing these issues. Among our practitioners in both countries 'parent blame' for poverty featured to some extent in the accounts of a majority of practitioners. We also found a relationship between the extent to which our practitioners felt individual parents are culpable for poverty and their reporting of more negative engagement with parents -particularly in England. We claim this is worthy of further study as a potential threat to the 'child-parent-practitioner triangle' and to remediation of poverty's effects within early educational contexts.

‘New normal’ or continued ‘social distancing’? Preschool practitioners’ responses to poverty across post-lockdown England and the USA

“…The combined sample mean score on this scale was 4.85 (SD = 1.92), with the English sample mean being 4.41, both on the more negative side of the scale. We have noted elsewhere how negative thinking of staff and ‘parent blame’ is a threat to the child, parent, practitioner triangle when working with the poor (Simpson et al, 2021), and can create and perpetuate social distancing: US 20 - The only way poverty makes a difference in the classroom is the mindset of the parents. ENG 53 - Parents seem to undervalue education and don't see it as a priority.…”

“…Throughout the article we refer to 'social distancing' to mean restriction in social connection between preschool practitioners and children and their parents/carers in poverty; rather than as a marker of physical distance. We completed a survey and interviewing in 2014 exploring ECEC practitioners' views about the causes of poverty and how these related to their self-reported responses to poverty across England and the USA (Simpson et al, 2017(Simpson et al, , 2021. Below we briefly discuss this research and the issue of social distancing.…”