Abstract:

Education of the child and the development of his/her personality is not determined only by living in the family, but after the child's entry to school, it is strongly influenced and to a certain extent modified by school and family cooperation. When the child starts attending school, the family becomes a member of the school community and the mutual school and family cooperation and family participation in the educational process affects the child´s successful social adaptation as well as his/her performance at school.

Currently, even despite the effort of educational institutions to involve parents in the co-decision processes, a number of barriers and prejudices persist in the relationship between family and school. Those barriers do not allow the creation of full relations between parents and teachers, those that are primarily based on trust, respect and reciprocal exchange of information. Due to the fact, school and family partnership yet remains an unreachable aim in practice.

An important fact in this context is minimum undergraduate teacher training during their studies, concerning the cooperation with the pupil's family. Within the professional training of future teachers but also the beginning teachers, theoretical knowledge may be absent as well as effective practical skills. As a consequence that affects cooperation with parents in a negative way is that parents do not consider the teacher sufficiently competent for the implementation of education and training.

In the world, especially in the USA, partnership and cooperation between families and schools play an important role and this is evident from many research studies. Family and school partnership programmes have already been successfully implemented in practice. In our conditions, the issue of partnership programmes are not developed at adequate levels. Research on the issue and teaching experiences point to the fact that cooperation of the both educational partners is determined by many factors. They arise not only from the specifics of the school environment but especially from the family one.

Lack of domestic provenance literature that would systematically elaborate the issue of school and family cooperation and its determinants stimulates us to examine the factors that result from the family and school environment, which affect – in a most significant way - cooperation of parents with teachers in the Slovak Republic.

Keywords:

Family, parent, school, teacher factors, education, child, cooperation.