The significance of school-family collaboration in promoting educational attainment and well-being is well recognised. In their meta-analysis of the effects of interventions to promote partnership between school and families, Smith et al. (2020) highlight the importance of relational elements such as bi-directional communication between parents and teachers. However, countless research projects, such as our ethnographic study conducted in a Swiss school during the first year of schooling (Ogay, 2017), report that teachers are ill-equipped to foster the quality of their relationships with parents. Interestingly, this does not prevent many school professionals from focusing only on parents and their difficulties or even “deficits” (Matthiesen, 2016), as if the school's action in the collaboration were self-evident and did not need to be questioned.

With the aim of taking full account of the relational dimension of the relationship between schools and families, we draw on contributions from the field of intercultural communication (in particular Frame, 2023; Gallois et al., 2005; Gudykunst, 2005; Ting-Toomey, 2017) to develop an approach of the school-family relationship as co-constructed in interactions (Ogay, 2024). We consider communication between schools and families to be intercultural by definition, as the frames of reference used by the interactants to give meaning to the situation can never be fully shared. As posited by Anxiety/uncertainty management theory (Gudykunst, 2005), the perceived strangeness of the interaction results in a perception of unpredictability, which affects both the exchange of meaning and the negotiation of identities in the interaction (Ting-Toomey, 2017). In our approach of the school-family relationship, we retain essential to consider all possible configurations between the interactants: there are no inherently good or bad, no innocent victims or guilty villains: strengths, weaknesses, fears, good or less good intentions may be present on both sides, parents as well as school staff. Both sides face challenges in working together, such as the ones associated with power imbalance, which can make some appear as potential threats to others. These challenges inevitably generate tensions (their expression being favoured by the move toward collaboration, as noted by Monceau, 2009), and require important communication skills from both, school staff and parents.

Our approach pays particular attention to the context, institutional and cultural, also spatio-temporal, in which interactions take place, and which constrains them. In particular, the institution “school”, with its norms and regulations, gives more or less importance to collaboration between school staff and parents and is more or less attentive to the diversity of realities faced by families. Our first ethnographic research project in the Swiss canton of Fribourg (Ogay, 2017) revealed an institutional context particularly marked by ethnocentrism, with the school tending to see itself as the centre of everything, as if everything revolved around it (Bizumic et al., 2021). Tensions abounded in the relationships between the actors but, whether in the school site or in the cantonal education department where we conducted our second study (Ogay & Conus, 2024), a common strategy we observed was to deny the conflict, or to try to contain it in order to maintain an appearance of good understanding. The combination of ethnocentrism and conflict avoidance results at best in a superficial relationship, in which the essential is never said. Clearly not enough to build a solid partnership.

The intercultural communication approach of the school-family relationship that we are proposing stems from two ethnographic studies: the first (COREL, 2014-2016) in a school site in the canton of Fribourg, and the second in its cantonal school administration (DÉCOLLE, 2019-2024) . Inspired by the critical ethnography of education proposed by Carspecken (1996), we carried out non-participant observations, individual and group interviews, and collected documents produced by our partners in the field as well as external documents (mainly newspaper articles). The data are managed and analysed using NVivo12 software, following a perspective of abductive content analysis (Hallée & Garneau, 2019). Validity is sought through various types of triangulation : between types of data (interviews, observations, internal and external documents); by varying the presence of the researchers collecting the data in the various observation sites and contexts; by the longitudinal dimension of the research; by team debriefing sessions in which the analyses of the team members who collected the data are confronted with those of the team members who were not present; and, for the DECOLLE study, by moments of ‘dialogic exchange’ about our analyses (especially on the first versions of the publications) with our informants on the field (Gremion et al., 2022).

Taking full account of the relational dimension of school-family relations means, firstly, considering that both actors contribute to the success – or lack of success – of the relationship, bringing into it their skills as well as their weaknesses and fears. However, if the relationship is built together in daily interactions, it is also constrained by the cultural and institutional context. It is therefore the responsibility of the school institution, and therefore of those in a position to formulate its policies, to create conditions conducive to collaboration with families, in all their diversity. This means, in particular, to give due importance to the relational skills of school professionals. Communication is a fragile and unsafe process, that requires reflexivity, attention to the relationship and its context, to one's own contribution in its development, as well as recognition of the anxiety caused by perceived threats to identity. Tensions are inevitable, but if recognised and worked through, they have the potential to contribute to the development of the relationship

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