Organising with Parents and Carers: Lessons from the US East Coast

At the charity where I work, The Brilliant Club, we’ve seen how building stronger relationships with parents* can help overcome these challenges. Through our Parent Power chapters, we work with parents from underserved communities where access to higher education is historically low – helping them build relationships, share experiences, and advocate for change.

Parent Power is rooted in broad-based community organising – a values-based methodology for creating social change. While there’s growing evidence that this kind of engagement can be highly effective, there is little research specifically exploring organising as a method of parental engagement.

That’s what led me to apply for a Churchill Fellowship. In May 2024, I travelled to New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Camden to learn from parents who had been engaged in successful organising. In the USA, community organising in education has a long history, with parent-led groups winning major victories – from $10 million for school repairs, to a $1 billion school building programme, and even a successful campaign to raise city taxes to properly fund education.

During my Fellowship, I met over 30 inspiring parents, organisers, teachers, and administrators. From these conversations, I took away four key lessons that could shape how we engage with parents in the UK:

Overcoming barriers

To open organising up to a broad base of parents, we need to understand and reduce the barriers they face – whether time pressures, motivation, or a distrust of educational institutions. As Stephen Williams, Principal of Mastery Molina in Camden, put it, parents’ primary focus is whether they “have a place that is warm or cool enough to raise my family and that is not chaotic”.

I saw that successful parent organising:

• Prioritises relationship development at times that work for parents
• Builds a culture of accountability between parents and institutions
• Tells stories of change to show what is possible, and celebrates wins to sustain motivation.

Building relationships

As Brooklyn teacher Claire Skotnes, said, “nothing can be accomplished without a good relationship”. Effective organising is intentional about the type of relationships it builds between parents, teachers, and decision makers, as well as how they are sustained.

I saw three types of relationship building in action:

• Bonding within a community: strengthening relationships between people in the same group or community
• Bridging within a community: developing relationships between people of very different backgrounds within one place
• Bridging with decision makers: developing relationships with those outside of a community who hold hierarchical power.

In the UK, we must be intentional about how we develop these relationships in the education sector and how we train parents to do so in a way that builds winning campaigns.

Schools as anchor institutions

In the schools I visited, organising was embedded in the school’s role as a community hub. For example, Patricia Jackson, a parent in Camden, talked about how organising had helped her develop a “bond and relationship with the teachers and principals” which created a sense of belonging.

Research by UCL and the National Education Union has shown that belonging in school matters – it’s been shown to improve pupil attainment and wellbeing. At Mastery Schools, organising is placed at the heart of their strategy, intentionally sharing power with parents and building capacity with their communities in the long term.

There are growing examples of this strategic approach in the UK, such as Reach Academy Feltham and other schools working with the Reach Foundation, as well as Dixons Academies and Co-Op Academies Multi-Academy Trusts. But we need to see this become standard practice across the UK to improve outcomes for young people.

Organising and programmes

In organising, ‘people before programme’ is an important principle. But the two do not need to work in opposition. Child First, a sustained after-school programme, highlights that, in fact, linking programmes to organising can make this work more sustainable.

Programmes like Parent Power can emerge out of parent-led organising, becoming a sustainable way to continue the impact of winning campaigns while staying rooted in communities.

What’s next?

I recently shared my findings in an online session with some of the people I met in the USA, and I hope this will remain an ongoing dialogue. In the UK, I hope my report will influence conversations around educational organising, and we will embed learnings from it into our Parent Power chapters at The Brilliant Club.

I’m also hoping to share this learning more widely across the education sector, through conferences, and will develop this work further as part of my PhD in Education and Social Justice at Lancaster University.

If anything in this blog resonates with your work, or you’d like to connect, please do get in touch with me at jimmy.pickering@thebrilliantclub.org.

*Please note: 'parents' refers to 'parents and carers' throughout this blog post.