Dwindling birth rates are a key problem to rural schools in Alpine Regions (Meusburger, 2005). In order to sustain good education in sparsely inhabited peripheral areas in Europe, new more flexible forms of school organization must be developed. Research about school improvement focuses mostly on the teachers’ or students’ view. The presented study will bring in another often neglected view, that of the parents. If new learning forms have to be introduced in school, parents have to be won over for such changes (French, Atkinson, & Rugen, 2007). Parents need to be convinced that their local school offers good education for their children, otherwise they might send their children to bigger regional schools and the local school will have to close down.

Our study is part of the Swiss-Austrian research project “Alpine Schools”, which analyses the conditions and possibilities of schools in Alpine Regions (Müller, Keller, Kerle, Raggl, & Steiner, 2011). The study is supported by the European Union (Interreg IV) and the Swiss Confederation.

Schools benefit of parent and family involvement (Epstein & Salinas, 2004). Research about parental involvement concentrates mainly on home-based behaviour (e.g., helping with homework), school-based activities (e.g., attending school events), or parent-teacher communication, but seldom on partnerships in school improvement processes (Hoover-Dempey et al., 2005). However, parents can play an important role while collaborating with the local school improvement team. Epstein & Salinas (2004) list six types of involvement from parenting, communicating, volunteering, learning at home, decision making to collaborating with the community. In German speaking countries teachers are rather sceptical about parental involvement. On the one hand parent-teacher communication is often based on problematic child behaviour, on the other hand parent and teacher’s roles are not well balanced. The teacher sees himself, contrary to the parent, as an expert (Shumow, 2001).

Teachers in small schools often have to adapt their teaching in order to teach several grades together in one classroom. In such multi-graded classes students need a more individualized way of learning. One way of dealing with a diverse group of students is to use differentiated instruction (Tomlinson et al., 2003). Differentiated instruction implies that tasks, activities or assessments are flexibly adapted to the learning needs of the students. The students work together in small groups while the teachers coaches individually. Baumgartner, Lipowski, & Rush (2003) could show positive effects of  differentiated instruction on reading achievement of primary and middle school students. Tieso (2005) also stated positive effects of curricular differentiation with between- and within-class grouping on student achievement.

Parents sometimes fear disadvantages from school improvement processes for their child. In our case, they might consider learning in multi-grade groups as less demanding since the teacher hasn’t got as much time as in single-grade classes for each child.

The resulting research questions for our survey were as follows:

·         What is the parents’ opinion of multi-age teaching?

·         What fosters a positive attitude of parents towards multi-age teaching?

·         What opinion of the school improvement project do parents have?

·         Which role does parent involvement play in our school improvement project?

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