Is school education getting lost in consumerism?

Research says that the single biggest ingredient in pupil achievement is parents, writes Michael Lambert

Parents pay an important role in their children's education. (Matt Cardy / Getty Images)

There is an adage that goes like this: we should focus on what we can control, all else is madness. With that in mind, governments want to subject schools to annual scrutiny as they are a relatively easily controlled variable in education. However, both the US president Barack Obama and the British prime minister David Cameron have been quite explicit about what is an uncomfortable truth for parents about education.

Research suggests that the single biggest contributory factor to pupil achievement is the quality of teachers. However, citing decades of social-science research, the US think tank, the Economic Policy Institute, states that differences in the quality of schools can only explain about one-third of the variation in pupil achievement. The single biggest ingredient in pupil achievement, it says, is parents.

In a speech last month, Mr Cameron seemed to endorse Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, a provocative book by the American author Amy Chua that proclaims that “academic achievement reflects successful parenting”, and that if a child did not excel in studies there is “a problem” – perhaps the parents “were not doing their job”.

So the school has no responsibility at all? Given that schools operate the world over in a culture where league tables, inspection ratings and coffee mornings act as the jury to decide about their future, it is an interesting consideration that parents should be rating themselves for their children's academic performances. This seems to be bad news to me.

Do we not have enough to feel guilty about? We, the parents, work long hours to provide a decent quality of life, as well as a safe, secure and stable environment for our children. As a result, we often sacrifice our own comfort.

Now it seems we are supposed to run an outstanding home support programme for our children. What next – a unified inspection framework for parenting?

This is perhaps going too far, but I think it is useful for us to recalibrate our expectations of schools, at least when it comes to academic outcomes.

The Economic Policy Institute in the US points out: “If a child’s parents are: poorly educated themselves and don’t read frequently to their young children. Or don’t use complex language in speaking to their children. Or are under such great economic stress that they can’t provide a stable and secure home environment or proper preventive health care to their children. Or are in poor health themselves and can’t properly nurture their children. Or are unable to travel with their children or take them to museums and zoos and expose them to other cultural experiences that stimulate the motivation to learn. Or, indeed, live in a zip [post] code where there are no educated adult role models and where other adults can’t share in the supervision of neighbourhood youth, then children of such parents will be impeded in their ability to take advantage of teaching, no matter how high quality that teaching may be.”

We live in the age of consumerism, when we expect to get bang for our buck, but perhaps it’s time that we realised that education is not an off-the-shelf product available for exchange or refund. It is a mutual responsibility of parent, pupil, government and school – perhaps in that order.

On that note I am off to read a bedtime story with my son.

Michael Lambert is headmaster of Dubai College and also a parent to two young boys