Facilitating relationships between schools and parents: can an on-site parents' centre help?

The link between disadvantage and educational attainment is well-acknowledged. Recent efforts in this
area have focused on classroom teaching, while parents are positioned in policy as primarily consumers,
exercising choice in a market. The proposed research studies a different approach, unusual in a time of
austerity, which attempts to address disadvantage by involving parents in school and seeking to provide
them with a range of services.
The setting is a newly developing parents' centre on a primary school site in a deprived area of London.
The headteacher intends that the centre becomes a mini-'community hub': an informal setting where
parents can meet teachers, support workers and each other, and access support including advice on
helping their children learn and help with benefits and wider issues.