A positive and robust parent-school relationship has been a cornerstone of some Christian faith-based schools (Prior 2017), and has also been shown to have significant impact on improving the academic, social and emotional growth of students (Emerson et al., 2019). Despite this however, parent partnership is one of the aspects of the founding vision of many faith-based schools that seems to be diminishing. Whilst some parents cite lack of time, others report negative experiences as reasons for disengagement. It is suggested that parents engage when they feel welcome and perceive direct value for their child. Many parents report, however, that their current experience of ‘partnership’ seems limited to fund raising and ‘turning up’ to events (Desforges and Abouchaar, 2019). This research will therefore explore the basis of why parent partnerships (PP) are important in school education; particularly focusing on the philosophical importance of PP in the Christian Education National (CEN) movement. It will then explore the PP experience from the parents’ perspective. This exploration aims to develop a greater understanding of parent engagement in a school, by examining the impact upon PP of a co-contributing style engagement program. Research will be conducted in two CEN schools where PP is a stated value of both individual schools and the national movement of CEN. The current research on PP generally indicates that partnership enhances student resilience, well-being and learning outcomes, through enhancing of agency (Epstein, 1998) This study proceeds on the assumption that PP is of benefit to the student. This research does not seek to measure student benefit per se, but rather limits its unit of enquiry to parent agency and its effects, if any, on parents’ perception and behaviour.

The paradigm through which these experiences will be described is that of coaching.  Teacher-parent coaching uses a conversational approach, with parents determining the coaching goal and directing the subsequent action they wish to take. The teacher-coach is the facilitator, rather than the director in this relationship with teacher and parent each contributing to the coaching conversation. This research seeks to investigate what, if any, effect this approach has on parents’ subsequent behaviours and ongoing school partnership as a function of their sense of engagement. The project will follow a qualitative, naturalistic paradigm of inquiry. This will allow research to be conducted in the naturally occurring setting of each school. It will include a research component of teacher-parent coaching. The project will use ethnography and insider research, drawing from the Powerful Insider Research Method to assist in mitigating against ethical and methodological problems associated with the researcher also being the current principal of one of the schools in the sample.