Parents' Involvement in Malaysian Autonomous Schools

One of the fundamental aspects underlying the implementation of the autonomous schools in Malaysia is the School-Based Management (SBM) practices. Previous studies indicated that SBM is viewed as a means of incorporating the voices of parents, teachers and the community in the school management in a formal manner. Thus, the aim of this study is to investigate the level of parents’ involvement in Malaysian autonomous school activities as perceived by teachers. The data for the study was obtained using questionnaire from 60 autonomous schools in Malaysia. A set of questionnaire consisting 20 items using the 10 Likert scales were answered by 788 respondents (teachers of autonomous schools). The findings shows that parents are among the stakeholders of Malaysian autonomous schools who are involved in the process of school policy-making and their involvement is relatively high in all school activities, where they always provide moral and material support to the schools; showing concern towards their children’s learning process and school improvement in general; cooperating with schools to improve students’ discipline and; attending periodical parent-teacher meetings. Furthermore, the findings also show that there is a pattern of parents’ involvement in each activity according to varies categories and types of autonomous schools. While, the MANOVA analysis reveals that there is a significant differences among the autonomous schools in the level of parents’ involvement regardless of their types and categories. Thus, the findings verify that the parents’ involvement in autonomous school activities is in line with the tenet of SBM which highlights parents’ roles in improving the function of the school as crucial education provider.