Ideas in the western world are changing about home-school relationships, and on how parents and teachers of school children communicate, collaborate and even build partnerships. Some changes are mainly because of development in our societies, for example due to growth in migration often from east to west in the recent two decades. Other changes arise from policy changes fuelled by increased individualism and liberalistic ideas that has had its impact on education.

This paper derives from the research project Language policies and practices of diverse immigrant families in Iceland and their implications for education, shortened to the LPP project. The objectives of the project are to explore language policies and practices of diverse immigrant families (Curdt-Christiansen, 2013; Spolsky, 2004), how these affect their children’s education and the relationships and interactions between these families and the children‘s teachers.

The research questions posed in this paper are:
How do principals and teachers percieve their relationships with migrant families?
How do they envision the possibilities to develop these relationships?

The paper builds on Bronfenbrenner‘s ecological systems theory (1979, 2005) and a further development of this by Schwartz (in press). The theory of Bronfenbrenner is useful to understand the relations between students, families, teachers and schools and how they are interrelated. Schwartz has furthered this well known model by bringing forth how different systems affect multilingual children‘s language identities. That brings attention to both overt and subtle influences a migrant background has on home-school relationships.

The theoretical framework also includes a family-school-community partnership model that is often attributed to Joyce L. Epstein (2011), who along with her colleagues formulated it and has led its development in collaboration with a group of researchers and teachers at all school levels. It describes how the three fields, that the title refers to, relate, and how important it is that family, school and society work together as a whole and thus support children in their development and education (Coleman, 2013).

Findings on home-school relationships in Iceland, deriving from a big data gathering for 10-15 years ago, showed that participants valued parental involvement highly as „Overall, about 99% of parents and school staff believed that parental support for the student was rather or very important to promote good academic results“ (Jónsdóttir and Björnsdóttir, 2012). Even so, findings reflected as well that there parents had different access to school. For example single mothers were more likely than other parents to feel that their voices were not heard at school when they needed support for their children (Jónsdóttir, Björnsdóttir and Bæck, 2017). During last two decades student populations in schools have become increasingly diverse in terms of languages and cultures. Therefore, many teachers are well aware of that they are facing new challenges such as cultivating relationships with all parents, and including diversity into their toolbox (Reykjavíkurborg, 2017).  On the other hand, it seems that teachers are often hesitating in building relationships with families, especially with those of foreign origin. Teachers in secondary schools in Norway are reluctant to open the doors for parental involvement, but well educated, middle class parents of Norwegian origin are more likely to be accepted than migrant parents are (Melnikova, 2023).

The LPP project involves 16 migrant families, who have diverse languages and educational and socio-economic backgrounds, their children, as well as the children’s teachers and principals at preschool and compulsory school levels and, where relevant, their heritage language teachers. The families live in four different municipalities in Iceland. Families speaking heritage languages belonging to both small (such as Philippines) and large (Polish) language groups in Iceland were selected. The municipalities are located in four different parts of Iceland and there may be important differences between the municipalities where the children are located when it comes to educational opportunities and support. Data for this paper was collected in semi-structured interviews with teachers and principals in the four participating schools. Semi-structured interviews were chosen to elicit the views of the participants as clearly and accurately as possible (Kvale, 2007).

Findings show that many migrant parents trust the schools and the teachers, and state that they get a lot of information but maybe not so much of cooperation. The teachers are aware of this as a general situation, but reveal they lack diverse resources such as time, tools and competencies to develop their relations with these families. They focus on the students, how they manage in school, andd talk about relations with their families with regard to how the parents can or can´t support their own children. Findings show that school leaders regard changes form a wider perspective, and talk about the challenges for schools. One principal spoke about the importance of personal relations, and that some migrant parents regarded it as strange, as they were not familiar with this approach „but maybe it is especially important because of cultural differences,“ he said. „And us and the parents, we have to be able to communicate frankly and openly. ... Maybe that's what we try to put a little effort into. And this maybe the human factor, that the school is a bit human“. Comparing findings to Epstein's (2011) model, reveals that home-school partnership is rather a distant dream in Icelandic complusory schools for the migrant parents, and that discussions about contact and communication are prevailing. Furthermore, the findings indicate that the situation in Icelandic schools may be similar to Melnikova's (2023) conclusion regarding migrant parents scarce possibilities to get involved in their childs schooling.

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