The Role Of Principal In Promoting Parental Involvement In Primary Schools

This research study aims at exploring the principals’strategies used for enhancing parent involvement in their schools, identifying the major challenges which have been encountered by principals in promoting parent involvement in the current education of Cambodia, and investigating the teachers’and parents’perception of principals’role in improving parent involvement. This research study was based on functional approach, parent empowerment approach, cultural capital approach and social capital approach because these approaches play important roles as lenses for analyzing in this study. According to Epstein (in Richardson,2009), parental involvement is the most powerful influence in a child’s education, and successful school leaders are adept at building structures for parents and educator work together.Many policies of MoEYS have been enacted for reinforcing the education quality, and student achievement. Most of them are placed the emphasis on the involvement of educators, community and parents. These are the immediate demand in Cambodian education nowadays.Mixed methods were employed in this study through triangulation for collecting data. Questionnaires both close-and open-ended questions including semi-structure interview were used as data collection instrument for conducting with principals, teacher, and students’parents. Quantitative data was analyzed by deploying descriptive statistics from SPSS version17.0whereas qualitative data was analyzed by using content analysis.The result of this study revealed that principals have played six roles which are the strategies for promoting parents involvement including an effective communicator, an organizer, a leader and decision-maker, an effective planner, a manager, and a coordinator. On the other hand, it also indicated that principals have encountered seven major challenges in taking effort to enhancing parent involvement including money, poverty of students’family, lower literacy at home, parent are unaware how to get involve with school, time constraint,lack of involvement from parents at school, lack of involvement from parent at home. Moreover, the result of investigation of teachers’ and parents’ perception of principals’role in the promotion parental involvement indicated that most of them have high positive attitude toward principals’role.