Understanding rural parent-school-community partnerships in Cambodia: practices, communications andrerceptions

Abstract

Child-Friendly School has been adopted as a national policy for basic education in many developing countries and UNICEF has also adopted the policy as an international framework for basic education. In Cambodia, the practice has now gone up to lower-secondary schools. Dimension 5 of this policy encompasses school openness to community participations which include those of parents and other important members of the community such as elderly, clergymen, village chiefs, and NGO representatives. What is not often heard of in many schools is the extent to which and through what means the stakeholders communicate about their children‘s education. Recognizing this gap, this research was devised to explore current practices and channels of communication that the stakeholders have advocated in Cambodia. This research employed a mixed research design in which both qualitative and quantitative data were collected. Five teachers, eight key informants and two student representatives were purposefully selected for semi-structured interview, while 33 parents and 33 students were also purposefully recruited for self-administered (face-to-face) questionnaires. In addition, field observation, document analysis, and focus group discussion were also employed in this study. The study found that the current practices of parent-school-community partnerships have not met the desired outcomes of CFS‘s dimension 5 yet. More attention should be placed on attracting parental and community involvements. For example, reconstructing the existing mechanisms such as SSC and SC for better involvement, more school‘s effort to reach out to parents and more attention from national level on policy and law on parent-teacher relation are needed.