Kotler and Fox (1994) state that even some private schools do not pay attention to marketing, because they think that it refers only to cases of buying and selling products or financial profit. Marketing encompasses much more than that, as it involves programming the institution's offers to meet the needs and desires of service users, being able to use effective communication and distribution means to inform, motivate and serve this public. In this sense, it should be clarified that educational marketing comprises processes of analysis, planning, implementation and control of programs designed to promote voluntary exchanges of values with the public served to achieve organizational objectives (Kotler & Fox, 1994).

The authors Marques and Romão (2021) identify what they call the myopic perception of what educational marketing is due to the deficit in the recognition and effectiveness of practices associated with marketing, even in institutions that use institutional evaluations and satisfaction of the public served. In fact, some of these institutions are so strongly tied to traditional programs that they do not realize that students' needs and desires change over time (Kotler & Fox, 1994). These same authors clarify that, on the other hand, some managers consider that marketing is incompatible with the educational mission, as they think that it goes in the opposite direction to the values of education, mainly, of the public school. They interpret that marketing only has the purpose of making money, not knowing that its principles apply to generating satisfaction in the served public.

Listening to the user of the educational service is essential to generate this satisfaction. This user can be the student or his/her family, in the case of young students. In addition to paying attention to the expectations of this public, the school must also listen to its teachers, since they are the ones who awaken in students an interest in learning, the main objective of the school. Listening to these actors is an important strategy to ensure the quality of the process. According to Reschke et al., (2018), the interest in listening to what families and teachers have to say contributes to decision-making by managers, with a view to improving the educational quality provided to citizens. The 5 Gaps model is very effective in this sense, as it identifies the level of satisfaction of the public served through the difference between their expectations and what managers perceive about this expectation.

The 5 Gaps Model, also called 5 Quality Gaps, is an instrument that aims to identify the origin of service quality problems and thus improve them. The model is composed of:

Gap 1: comprises the difference between customer expectations and managers' characteristics regarding these expectations.

Gap 2: Relate the difference between managers' characteristics regarding customer expectations with service quality specifications.

Gap 3: understands the service quality specifications compared to what is actually provided to the customer.

Gap 4: address the gap between the service actually provided and external communications promises about that service.

Gap 5: covers the difference between customer expectations and the perception of the performance of the service provided, expressed as the sum of the other gaps. (Parasuraman et al., 1985, p. 44).

Thus, this model of analysis of the Quality Gaps, although designed for private organizations, can also provide public administration institutions with a measure of quality. Parasuraman et al. (1985) argue that it is important to measure and know the differences in perceptions to minimize discrepancies and thus pursue an adequate standard of quality, as well as pointing out the need to carry out more studies in the area of quality in educational institutions and its main stakeholders, and thereby improve the quality of service and update it for the future.

Stakeholder demands and expectations regarding service quality vary according to their attitudes, needs and experiences (Kieling, Souza, Lyra, & Boeing, 2021). In order to meet the expectations of the interested parties, it is necessary to identify the perception of each one of them about the quality of the services provided. The quality of the service provided is an important aspect of user satisfaction (Marimuthu & Ismail, 2012; Violin, 2021) and satisfaction is formed by several factors, often intangible, not being easy to measure.

According to Freire (1979) it is ideal that all those who make up the school community (managers, teachers, students, parents or guardians…) participate, democratically, in the elaboration and decision-making processes of the direction of public school management. This process not only improves the quality of teaching, but also contributes to the human development of all those involved.

When students are enrolled in a certain school, their expectations and those of their families (parents or guardians) are many and must be observed by all those who work in the school space, especially the expectations regarding the role of teachers in the teaching-learning process. In order for this expectation to be met, teachers need to know the desires of these citizens, but also need to expose what they think and expect from their students. This difference between what the public served expects and what the professor thinks he expects, is the investigation suggested by Mainardes and Domingues (2010) on the Gap of relationships.

According to their specificities, the services provided at the school are extremely dependent on the students and/or their families, as this service is consumed at the same time as it is produced, in the interaction between teacher and student. For these reasons, understanding stakeholder expectations can contribute to better organizational performance (Ferraz et al., 2018). Investing in the quality of basic education means reducing public costs, minimizing dropout rates and improving learning rates.

For a long time, the family was solely responsible for the education of children, which occurred only in the family environment. Only in the 19th century, with the advent of public education in Brazil, this task was transferred to the school, as an entity provided with specific competences to promote teaching (Silva, 2009). In the middle of the 20th century, new social trends promoted different forms and ways in family/school relationships (Nogueira, 2006). According to the authors, since then, family and school have shared the commitment to educate children in the best possible way. Even though school and family are different institutions, with different rules and objectives, both share the most noble task: that of educating (Diambo & Branco, 2021).

Paulo Freire, one of the great names of Brazilian education, public manager in São Paulo in 1989 and 1992, highlighted in his works the importance of an open dialogue between family and school for the alignment of expectations about formal education. He argued that, only in this democratic perspective, the child could have an environment conducive to the full development of learning. Corroborating with this author, it is believed that the success of the relationship between school and family is related to the ability to keep children and adolescents in schools and manage to guarantee them the achievement of quality education, making the public educational system more egalitarian.

Lahire (1997) and Silva (2009) draw attention to the existing interdependence between the family and the school, in the task of teaching children. Thus, the relationships between family and school can influence the results obtained by students in school subjects, sometimes with gains, sometimes with losses, thus showing the balance or imbalance of this social relationship.

School success can be conceived through the perspective of educability, whose notion must be understood as the relationship between the mechanisms that the child has (acquired in the family) and the expectation that the school has of it. Therefore, it is an adaptation between two cultures, educational and parental. It is about a division of tasks in relation to the children's education; it is as if there were a pact between family and school, in which it is up to the family to provide primary education on which formal education is based (López, 2008). And the aforementioned author goes on to explain that education is not a simple transfer of knowledge that places the student in the condition of an inert learner, but is a construction that involves learning experiences, where students and teachers have different attributions and expectations. The school expects its students to come to it with a set of resources, aptitudes and predispositions and puts the family at the center of the scene (López, 2008).

But this is not always possible due to the social conditions that a given family finds itself. In Brazil, this reality is latent in public schools. The expectation of the school system can be so different from the reality of the family that it can also contribute to school dropout, where both the family and the student find themselves in a condition where they cannot reach that expectation. That is why the expectation of the public education system cannot fail to consider the precarious situation in which many students live, who have to leave their studies aside to help support their homes, for example.

In the research carried out by Marques and Romão (2021, p. 218) in schools in Portugal, two interesting aspects can be observed regarding expectations. The first is that “the socioeconomic context of the school's surroundings” is another factor for external analysis in marketing practices and the “social support given by the school to families” highlights the social responsibility of the school”; and the second concerns “the social support given by the school to the families”, where it was possible to perceive that there are a series of social responsibility actions practiced and taught by the schools that end up influencing and resulting in benefits for the families, among them the separation of garbage, practices of environmental responsibility/sustainability, collecting toys, among other actions that reverberate in changes of positive attitudes in the families.

For López (2008), therefore, there is a gap between what the child has and what the school expects, a distance that is evident in the public educational system. The Gap is evident when the school persists in aspiring an attitude and commitment from the families on occasions when they cannot offer it. This is the great importance of listening to the family, as they visualize a school that always has a lot to say and little to hear (Silva, 2009).

The theme “strategy to promote school success” is found in numerous studies, such as Franco (2001), Soares and Collares (2006) and Diambo and Branco (2021). These studies present results of educational evaluations, demonstrating that the family's involvement in the child's school life positively interferes with their academic development, contributing to the drop in school dropout rates.

Knowing what the family expects from the school and also making it clear to the family what the school expects of them, the school has the possibility of providing opportunities for students to improve their learning, enhancing dreams of a better, more peaceful life with the minimum of human dignity (Lomônaco & Garrafa, 2009).

In a survey of schools in Lebanon on student-teacher interaction, one of the research questions was whether “teachers' reports of their own practices and attitudes in the classroom are in line with students' perceptions of these practices and attitudes and with the researcher's observations? (Hashash, Abouchedid, & Abourjeily, 2018, p. 3). Thus, it is observed that the practice consists of studies related to the school context to the detriment of parents' expectations regarding teaching.

With the aim of detecting whether the responses of respondents classified by their role in the institution (teachers and family members) present means with statistically significant differences, comparisons were made using Student's statistics (t). Data were individually analyzed and compared with each variable selected for the present study, as well as confronted with general expectations about the quality of teaching at the school and general expectations about the school.

In order to allow the performance of the t-test, the complete sample was divided into two independent groups (Hair Jr. et al., 2005). In this sense, it is intended to achieve the central objective of this work, that is, to verify if there are differences in expectations between the two groups surveyed (teachers and family members) in public elementary schools I of Administrative Region 2 of the Municipality of Vila Velha. In other words, an attempt is made to find an eventual perception gap between these two groups. Table 1 presents the results.

Table 1: Comparison of sample means of students’ families and faculty sample

Source: Research Data (2022). *Explanatory note n. 1: Among the means of the variables observed with statistically significant differences, the variable (4): Classes with current content and aligned with social reality (F = 4.5842; CD = 4.3594), the variable (5): New and rich personal and educational experiences (F = 4.7056; CD = 4.4844), the variable (12): Access to student information (F = 4.0392; CD = 3.4262) and the variable (21): Adequacy of class sizes (F = 4.4663; CD = 3.6000), show higher averages in the grades distributed by families when comparing them to the average grades of the faculty. Thus, families expect more than teachers project that they expect.

** Explanatory note n. 2: On the other hand, the averages of the variable (1): Degree of teaching demand (F = 3.7607; CD = 4.1833), of the variable (11): Clear and defined bureaucratic processes (F = 4.4056 ; CD = 4.6984), of the variable (18): Pleasant environment conducive to learning (F = 4.5773; CD = 4.8281), of the general variable (24): General expectation about EDUCATION at the school (F = 4.0816; CD = 4.5179) and the variable (25): General expectation about the SCHOOL (F = 4.0609; CD = 4.4655), indicated that families have lower expectations compared to what the teachers believe that families expect.

Thus, significant differences were detected (p value <0.05), noting that the two groups responded differently in relation to the expectations of the students' parents/guardians. Of the 25 variables surveyed, statistically different means were detected in 09.

In view of the results, in which parents and guardians granted higher averages when related to the average grades of the faculty, it is evident that it is necessary to pay attention to the demands of interested parties (families). These data reveal a lack of knowledge on the part of teachers, pointing to the presence of Gap 1, which comprises the difference between what users (families) think and what school representatives (teachers) believe the public served expects. In a survey on expectations, knowledge and involvement of parents, carried out with Chinese immigrants in Washington in the United States, it was shown that the expectations of this group differ from the expectations of teachers, insofar as they idealize future outcomes for their children, such as they expected their children to go to college or even that their children could study hard at school (Ji & Koblinsky, 2009, p. 697). However, despite the study concluding that the involvement of parents is beneficial, few are actually involved in school activities, due to the socioeconomic situation and the difficulty of communication, which is not far from Brazilian cases.

Teachers, as representatives of the school, need to know the expectations of families for alignments to take place. In this way, managers, together with the school community, will be able to define priorities, develop plans and draw up more effective action plans for the school. By not aligning these expectations well, the efforts of the school as a whole may be, in part, frustrated and will not reach the expectations of families and the educational system. In this sense, Diambo and Branco (2019) provide relevant data on the perception of teachers and families about the family-school relationship at a public institution in Angola. Teachers interviewed report that the school often makes decisions without consulting parents and guardians and that this negatively affects families.

Continuing with the analyses, the presence of Gap 1 again stands out because, as shown, the faculty had higher expectations compared to the responses of the families. If the school team does not know what parents and guardians want from the institution, some efforts may even displease these families, as it became clear that they do not care so much about the variables that teachers believed to be the most important, proving the perception gap. In this sense, in order for a perceived quality service to be delivered, both teachers and managers need to focus their efforts and be attentive to the wishes of families, since we understand the school as a democratically managed public space.

Among the few investigations on the subject involving the term expectation, an Australian survey on the expectations of first-year students: results of a student survey across the university noted a certain approximation with the proposed study (Crispÿ et al., 2009). The authors point out that it is necessary to consider that there is a significant difference between the expectations of students and the experience that institutions are prepared to offer. That is, the expectations of one group are not always correlated to the other, and this happens, basically, because of two factors, one is the fact that expectations from the students' side (which involves families, for example) they are generally unrealistic, and the other cause is associated with the information provided by the institution about its culture or simply because the institution is unaware of the students' expectations.

Thus, it is necessary to consider that both teachers and other professionals are prone to make erroneous assumptions about the needs of students, since the understanding is based on their own expectations, not those of the student (Pithers & Holland, 2006). In this sense, it is observed that of the nine significant variables, there is only one similarity in terms of the degree of demand for teaching and a certain discrepancy in the evaluations carried out between family members and the teaching staff, the Figure 1 clarifies these results.

Figure 1: Comparative table of expectations of teachers and family members

Source: Research Data (2022).

It is noticed that, despite the agreement regarding the expectation regarding the degree of demand of teaching for the two groups, there is a difference in the results, where the four variables best evaluated by the faculty were not the same as those of the group of family members. This fact confirms the existing gap between the population of this study.