Determinants of teacher-parent partnership on children’s education in selected public primary schools of Kamonyi district.

Abstract

The key foundation of education is primary education. If children get the effective primary education, they help them to pursue successfully the following ones. The primary schools present crucial opportunities for children’s growth, development and learning. The effective teacher-parent partnership in their children’s education is thus important since the parents are the first educators of their children, if they work in partnership with teachers, the children can have the strongest foundation of education. Most importantly, parents’ engagement in their children’s education develop their academic results. The main objective of this thesis was therefore to explore the determinants of teacher-parent partnership in their children’s education as influenced by: level of partnership between parents and teachers, teachers’ views on teacher-parent partnership, barriers that hinder teacher-parent partnership and the strategies that can be implemented by the schools to promote the effective teacher-parent partnership in their children’s education. Model of Parents' Engagement, which outlines six categories of parental engagement like parenting, communication, volunteering, at-home learning, decision-making, and community collaboration served as the study's foundation. The study employed the descriptive research design and specifically used the survey method, focused on cross-sectional survey. The sample size constituted 4 schools, 4 head teachers, 6 teachers and 100 parents. A questionnaire was utilized to gather data from parents, and a schedule of interviews was employed to obtain information from head teachers and primary teachers. Data were examined using both qualitative and quantitative methodologies. The findings revealed that parents consistently participated in activities that needed them to financially support their children. However, parents rarely participated in other academic activities due to a lack of teacher-parent collaboration, which limits their access to timely academic information on their children. The study thus concluded that there was poor teacher-parent partnership where parents involved more in activities that required financial contribution to the expense of other necessities. It was therefore recommended that policy developers should specify clearly the contribution of parents in their children’s academic process and the way of following up their implementation.