Issues in addressing children's difficulties in literacy development through family-school partnerships

Many pupils experience difficulties in literacy apart from those whose individual learning needs are recognized for special resourcing. Their parents and carers are, potentially, an important source of additional support in encouraging literacy acquisition. Embedded within different home-school partnership arrangements are presuppositions about the ability and right of families and/or carers from a diversity of backgrounds and cultures to support the literacy development of their children. These presuppositions can serve to include or alienate both parents and their children. In addition, embedded within particular approaches and strategies for developing literacy are a variety of underlying assumptions about the process of literacy acquisition. This article will illustrate these issues with reference to particular programmes and techniques currently in common use in schools for supporting the literacy acquisition of children who experience difficulties. It will go on to outline the fundamental importance of schools recognizing these issues in order that they may negotiate effective home-school literacy programmes which can harness all available resources to address difficulties in literacy developmen