"Everybody has got their own story" : urban Aboriginal families and the transition to school

Parent involvement in schools is not something new (Henderson and Berla 1994). Parents continue to play a significant role in children's school learning (LaRocque et al. 2011). Developing family-school partnerships has been part of school policies and community development for some time, and remains a major challenge and an area for targeted growth despite considerable investment of time and resources (Department of Education Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR) 2008). In this chapter, we define parent involvement and its role in children's learning and in family-school partnerships. A model of parent involvement is described and the reader is introduced to the rhetoric-reality gap. Three case studies, developed from parent and teacher interviews, are used to show the range of experiences of parent involvement and relationships that exist between families and schools for participants of the Gudaga Goes to School Study, a study of urban Aboriginal children's and families' transition to school (Kaplun et al. 2016).