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Doing the Dirty Work of Social Class? Mothers' Work in Support of their Children's Schooling

A major achievement of feminist research has been the broadening of the concept of work to include ‘the invisible labour’ of the home and neighbourhood (Glucksmann, 1995; Ungerson, 1997). A growing, but still relatively neglected, aspect of domestic labour is the educative work increasingly expected of parents. Over the past twenty years there has been an increased emphasis on the accountability of parents for their children’s learning, but more recently expectations that parents become ‘home educators’ have grown exponentially. Since the early 1990s, parental involvement has been officially recognized as a key factor in school improvement and effectiveness (Reynolds and Cuttance, 1992), and in 1994 became a requisite part of a school’s development plan (OFSTED, 1994). OFSTED guidelines issued the following year (1995: 98) encouraged inspectors to explore how well schools help parents to understand the curriculum, the teaching it provides, and how this can lead to parents and teachers working together to provide educational support at home. Miriam Glucksmann (2000a) argues that the boundaries between household and market economies, and what is produced in each, varies over time and between places. Educational activities have always gone on in middle class households and a significant numbers of working class ones. However, what has changed is the intensification of this work within the home. The educational workload of families has grown apace and school work is now seen to be the responsibility of the family as well as the teacher. Glucksmann has developed the notion of the ‘total social organization of labour’ which refers to ‘the social division of all of the labour in a given society of whatever kind between institutional spheres’ (Glucksmann, 2000a:19), and we need to deploy such an understanding of work in order to grasp both the shifting balance in relation to educational work between family and state schooling, and the current high expectations and delegated responsibilities imposed on families.