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Abstract

The incursion of neoliberalism has impacted many facets of education worldwide. This article focuses on one of these: parent–school partnerships. Using a social semiotic approach, the authors analyse the websites of two primary schools in Singapore and examine how the semantic features of implications and presuppositions on the websites propagate the ideology of a transactional relationship between parents and schools. The social semiotic analysis reveals that parents were positioned as consumers through the multimodal choices on the web pages, with the ultimate message that the way to partner the school in education was to volunteer physically at the school. The authors discuss the implications of such an ideology and propose recommendations towards enabling parents to be partners in education.

Keywords

critical discourse analysis education ideology neoliberalism parent–school partnership website analysis

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‘Please tell us how you can volunteer your contributions to the school’: a social semiotic analysis of school websites

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