contribution of school to building up the partnership with parents

This paper studies the way in which headmasters and class masters perceive and estimate the factors, obstacles and incentives to building up a partnership between school and parents. The sample consists of 60 headmasters and 305 class masters from 60 schools (37 urban and 23 rural) in Serbia. Headmasters and teachers filled in separate, but parallel questionnaires (modified only in the segment of different roles) that were created for the purposes of research. Questionnaire items inquire about the factors contributing to the inclusion of parents, the obstacles in developing the cooperation between parents and school and the peculiarities of school environment that can contribute to the development of that cooperation, as well as about the peculiarities of the communication with parents. Research findings indicate that headmasters and teachers assess the importance of different components in the field of cooperation with parents in a similar, but not identical way. Most similarities are found in the perception of obstacles for establishing cooperation (the problems of coordinating time periods for meetings, previous bad experiences of parents regarding cooperation). The majority of differences lie in perceiving the importance of cooperation factors (headmasters emphasise the "parent factor", while teachers do so both for the "parent factor" and "child factor"), as well as in perceiving the necessary incentives for the improvement of cooperation between school and parents (headmasters emphasise the spatial-temporal organization components, and teachers do so for spatial components and personal initiatives). In the assessments of both the headmasters and teachers we obtained differences marked by gender, the longitude of years of service, size of the settlement where the school is located (town-village). The general conclusion indicates that the topic of cooperation between school and parents is highly and in many ways context sensitive, and that the building of cooperation program must be preceded by the process of systemic and systematic dialogue shaping of the topic on the level of every individual school, in order to purify the existing multiverse meanings and thus provide foundation for clear, locally meaningful and sustainable cooperation programs.