The relationship between parents and school is embedded in complex, intersectionally interwoven migration society power relations: Educational institutions are oriented at the idea of ‘good parenting’ and ‘good parents’ shaped by the notion of the ‘normal family’ as middle class, white, heterosexual, cisgender, sedentary, healthy and productive (cf. Fitz-Klausener et al., 2021, S. 7). Within the common addressing of parents as responsible actors in the field of children’s education this orientation leads to othering and problematizing as well as an ignorance and a de-thematization of parents with deprivileged positionings according to these norms (cf. Vincent et al., 2012). Institutionally provided options for parental engagement (e.g. parents' evenings, engagement in the school boards, homework supervision) often remains to them not (entirely) accessible for a variety of reasons (Chamakalayil et al., 2021; Gomolla, 2011). However, parents find (other) ways to pursue their educational aspirations and those for their children. One of these ways is the focus of this paper – resorting to help from powerful members within the community, which we discuss as an ambivalently positioning action. On the one side, we explore the figure of help in the context of the society of migration as a continuation of a colonial discourse, which is increasingly utilized in schools and is advancing into an important normative orientation: ‘migrant others ’must be helped and are being helped with various (educational) measures. In continuation of the global societal charity-motivated imaginations, subject positions are created, which unfold along a dividing line between ‘the needy, inferior others’ and ‘the helping, naturally superior, belonging’. On the other side, we understand looking for help and being helped as a strategic parental action in dealing with societal inequalities within educational institutions aiming at fulfilling educational aspirations. The data for the paper derives from a research project funded by the SNSF, which focuses on the relationship between parents and school in the context of social inequalities. With the help of the biographical case reconstruction (cf. Rosenthal, 2011), parental agency in their social interdependence are explored and contexts, discursive and institutional frameworks are examined with the perspectives of subjectivation theory (cf. Butler, 1997a, 1997b). Parental agency and processes of appropriation, distancing and resignification within the societal relations of power and difference are of particular interest in this paper.

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