Children's life chances are enhanced when relationships between home and educational settings are strong. This original piece of research involved second-year trainee teachers who were surveyed about their perceptions about parents and the nature of the partnership relationship. Research suggests that teachers act in accordance with their beliefs when their knowledge, understanding and confidence is high. Using this assumption, this small scale study was contextualized utilized a set of open-ended questions. The study consider the participants' own experiences of families and parenting. Contextual discourse analysis was employed to analyse the policy-based data for this project. The initial findings suggest that the challenge for new teachers is their confidence in potential relationships with parents in relation to their feelings of being qualified but a novice. This is a timely paper, given the current developments in education policy in England which may impact on future teacher training. (author abstract)