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y leaving their children at the outer gates of the school to go in alone.

As a principal of this institution for the past eleven (11) years, I have noticed a decline of parental involvement in school activities. Parents of the incoming students are usually the ones most likely to be involved in school activities, but after the first three months they lose interest and start imitating the behaviours of previous parents. As a result of this challenge, it is my intention to conduct an action research to identify barriers to parental involvement and to develop and implement strategies to foster changes through focus group, and improve parental involvement in school activities. Findings will be communicated through discussion to other educators.

Purpose of the Study

The purpose of this study is to investigate the low level of involvement of parents in school base activities in a selected inner-city basic school and to find strategies to improve their involvement using recommendations from focus group discussions. According to Mills (2007) in using the bottom-up strategies, parents would be the ones making the recommendations for change instead of the top-down strategies in which the school administration makes the decision. As a result, this will be more meaningful as parents will buy into the idea as it came from them. In particular, the action research study will focus on the dependent variable parental involvement and independent variable focus group. Consequently, parental involvement should be impacted by the focus group which will result in an improvement of parents in school base activities.

Keywords: parental involvement, school base activities, inner-city, basic school, practitioners, focus group.

Outline of Innovation

Innovations are necessary to effect changes, so as educators we should be open to welcome different innovations in our school environment in order to improve the teaching and learning situation. The purpose for this innovation is to improve parental involvement in school base activities. This action research project entails using a focus group as the innovation. A focus group is a form of qualitative research in which a group of people are asked about their perceptions, opinions, beliefs and attitude towards product, service, concept or idea. For this research project parents will be asked their opinion of parental involvement and recommendations to improve parental involvement. This will involved parents working together to come up with strategies which will also be informing them of what they can do as parents. Some benefits of using a focus group is that it will generate a multiplicity of views and develop group dynamics. Great benefits can also be derived from non-verbal communication as this tells more about the topic than what is spoken about the topic. The diversity of the participants will add to the variety of opinions that are generated, hence creating many ideas for solution and change.

Two recommendations from the focus group will be implemented at different intervals to improve parental involvement. This will be done for the period April to October in all school base activities in which parents are involved. If the intervention does not work, other recommendations from the focus groups will be implemented and evaluated.

At the beginning of this action research quest