Parental involvement in early childhood eduction in Catalunya, Spain

Abstract

In the last 20 years parental involvement has had an increasing interest in Catalunya leading to changing the ECEC setting’s practices and in the promotion of research in this field. International and national research evidenced the importance of parental involvement with their children to promote a healthy development and success in education as well as in family services and schools. For this reason, the ECE curricula includes the importance of working in collaboration with parents, but still there are some challenges to achieve a significant partnership, such as improving teacher training at university level and also changing some conceptions about the teacher’s role with the families. This chapter focuses on the laws, the main family support services to promote parental engagement with the community and the parental involvement in the schools. Some successful strategies are highlighted together with a more detailed project to improve parents-school meetings.