The present study is based on a unique 9-year set of longitudinal data, derived from a set of surveys through which we followed a group of Finnish parents (N = 326) from their child’s preschool year to the end of his/her comprehensive education. The follow-up surveys were conducted every two years, and in each survey we asked the university and vocationally educated mothers and fathers to evaluate an array of aspects of the functioning of their child’s school. We were interest in finding out what changes occurred in parental satisfaction. Theoretically speaking, our investigation was conducted within a positional frame of reference (Doise, 1986). In this line of thinking, a shared social position or membership in a social category is seen to generate similar experiences and related attitudes to, and views of, social reality and thus to produce a similar relationship to that reality. A parent’s education and gender locate her/him in the educational hierarchy and thus ‘measure’ his/her social-psychological distance from the school. Accordingly, we asked in the present study how these positions organized the parents' views of their child’s school and, consequently, their satisfaction with it.

One part of the follow-up questionnaires was entitled “Satisfaction with the functioning of the school.” The instruction read as follows: “You have now had a considerable number of experiences connected with your child’s schooling. On the basis of these experiences, please indicate how satisfied or dissatisfied you are with the following aspects.” The aspects to be considered included “the quality of the instruction”, “the aptness of the assessment”, “the child’s school performance”, “the cooperation between school and home”, “the fairness of treatment”, “parents’ opportunities of influencing their child’s schooling”, “the attention paid to the child’s individual characteristics”, and “the way in which the school has dealt with the child’s problems.” The parents were requested to indicate their choices on a five-point rating scale ranging from “totally dissatisfied” (1) to “totally satisfied” (5).

It was found that the level of parental satisfaction was fairly high at the start, that the general decreasing trend was quantitative rather than qualitative, and that the proportion of dissatisfied parents remained low and stable. A pattern of differences emerged to suggest that the parents’ perceptions were structured by their social-psychological distance from the school as measured by their social positions; eg., the vocationally educated parents displayed less satisfaction than the academically educated ones. Our findings also suggest that despite these differences there is a noticeable degree of shared parental satisfaction. In particular, the observation that the parents were fairly satisfied with the fairness of treatment and the aptness of assessment is of social-psychological significance, because it implies that the parents are generally inclined to acknowledge the legitimacy of the school. Thus, the school still seems to be an institution whose authority and legitimacy in determining the child’s educability is not seriously called into question by parents. This in turn is an important social requisite making it social-psychologically possible for the school in its workaday practices to transform the originally social differences amongst the pupils into individual differences in natural ability