The ParENTrepreneurs project, supported by Parents International, officially concluded on April 30, 2022. It marked a significant milestone in empowering parents with entrepreneurial skills and knowledge. The final report, submitted in June, solidified its outcomes, but the project’s legacy continues. The Social Learning Platform remains active, offering ongoing training opportunities in English, Finnish, French, Italian, and Spanish.

Parents can still become certified ParENTrepreneurs by completing training programs. These materials are widely used to equip parents and teachers with entrepreneurial education tools, contributing to a thriving ecosystem of lifelong learning. Despite unprecedented challenges like lockdowns, restrictions, and uncertainties, the project’s success highlights the resilience of its partners and participants.

Key Outputs of ParENTrepreneurs

The project produced five cornerstone intellectual outputs, collaboratively developed by the partnership:

1. Competence Framework for ParENTrepreneurs
   Designed to assess needs and identify skills for the target audience, this framework aligns with the EntreComp Framework, providing a foundation for entrepreneurial competency development.
2. Training Package for ParENTrepreneurs
   Comprising six modules, this package directly links to the Competence Framework, equipping participants with practical entrepreneurial knowledge and skills.
3. Social Learning Platform
   An open-source e-learning and networking hub, it allows learners to pursue self-paced training, complete assessments leading to certification, and access resources for further self-improvement and parenting practices.
4. Parents to Parents Manual
   This manual supports peer-to-peer learning and enables trained parents to organize their own training sessions. It provides supplementary guidance to enhance the primary training program.
5. Guide to Validation and Recognition of the Program
   Focused on the assessment process, this guide demonstrates the program’s value to employers and policymakers, ensuring its recognition and validation.

All outputs were developed in English and translated into Finnish, French, Italian, and Spanish, with select resources also available in Dutch.

Activities and Engagement

The ParENTrepreneurs project incorporated diverse activities to achieve its objectives:

• Transnational Meetings
  Three in-person meetings were held in Matera, Amsterdam, and Helsinki, complemented by online coordination meetings and monthly calls to ensure smooth communication.
• Stakeholder Engagement
  Over 100 experts, including entrepreneurship educators, parent leaders, and researchers from 18 countries, contributed to the Competence Framework’s development through consultations and an online survey. This approach ensured the framework was both scientifically robust and user-friendly.
• Pilot Trainings
  To refine the training framework, pilot sessions were conducted both online (in Finland, Italy, Spain, and the UK) and in person (in the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, and Hungary).
• Train-the-Trainers Event
  An international event in Amsterdam prepared participants to lead future training sessions, creating a network of facilitators.
• Multiplier Events
  Organized by each partner, these events introduced the project’s outcomes to a broader audience, ensuring implementation beyond the project’s lifecycle.

To ensure accessibility, in-person training sessions provided parallel activities for participants’ children, enabling parents to focus entirely on their learning experience. Approximately 140 people attended the multiplier events, and 20 participants joined the Train-the-Trainers event.

Enduring Impact of ParENTrepreneurs

Even after its conclusion, the ParENTrepreneurs project continues to make a significant impact. The Social Learning Platform remains a vital resource for those seeking certification and ongoing development in entrepreneurial parenting.

The project not only equips parents with entrepreneurial tools but also fosters a sense of collaboration and empowerment among families, schools, and communities. It stands as a testament to innovation in education and the resilience of those committed to lifelong learning.

The German National Erasmus+ Agency invited us to attend the “High quality in school education mobility projects – a dialogue between coordinators of accredited mobility consortia, course providers and national agencies” Conference held in Cologne on 13-14 June 2022. The event was attended by about 60 people from various European countries from Iceland to Spain, from Ireland to Hungary. Parents International was invited for two reasons: to join the dialogue as a course provider, and to highlight the importance of engaging parents in education and Erasmus+ activities. The latter took the form of a workshop that we delivered with our collaboration partner, the European School Heads Association. The event also brought the possibility of new partnership and especially the potential to provide more trainings to education professionals, especially teachers and school leaders.

The event started with half a day of informal discussions in three groups: course providers (that we attended), representatives of school consortia participating at mobility activities, and national agencies. The event, and also our informal discussion group, was attended by representatives of the European Commission responsible for mobility programmes.

In the plenary session of the first day, the most interesting presentation was that of the new European School Education Platform that we are an official supporter of. There was another very relevant and very interactive plenary presentation on the challenges of quality in mobility programmes, especially trainings.

Our joint workshop with ESHA’s Director Petra van Haren was entitled Collaborative school leadership and the role of parent engagement in projects. After a first round of discussion and participants’ sharing their experiences, both organisations made a brief presentation that was further discussed in the workshop. Discussions were so much engaging that they continued into coffee break and the next session. Apart from our usual arguments for parental engagement, we have raised and discussed the issue of the often discontinued offer of trainings developed in Erasmus+ Strategic Partnerships, and we also provided our own practice of offering such trainings as an inspiration.

Child Up Final Conference in Brussels 9-10 June 2022 – what we had to say as a member of their International Stakeholder Committee

The Child Up project was dealing with child agency and especially the agency and recognition of agency in the case of migrant children. It is a crucial element of their inclusion. We were invited to contribute on practice related to this topic. The input from our Director, Eszter Salamon was highlighting on some aspects we rarely consider, and also on how engaging parents can support child agency.

When it comes to adults understanding that children have agency and supporting its development, it is worth having a historic look at how much adults have trusted children that they are capable of doing things. Jesper Juul, the renown and recently deceased family therapist from Denmark raises this issue in his last book, Leitwölfe Sein (Be the leader of a pack of wolves) that has not yet been published in English. In the book, he calls parents to behave like the leader of a pack of wolves normally behave: set directions, allow all members to fight for their status, but support the weaker ones. However, he also mentions that the later – the key to child agency – is a moving target, the view of parents on this has been changing over time. The child rights movement has tried to make all adults understand that children are rights holders and have agency on their own right. Juul makes a link between this and the women’s rights movement. In 2022, it is difficult to believe that even a few decades ago women were not allowed to open their own bank account without their father or husband signing it off in some European countries, and we still don’t see the full emancipation of women. And the suffragettes had chained themselves to tailings about a century ago. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) is only a little over 30 years ago, and children – especially younger children – are unlikely to start a juvenile suffragettes-like movement. So it is up to the adults in their lives, especially their parents, to fight for the recognition of their agency. Hopefully, in the case of children it will not take more than a hundred years, but in this area again we are very far from being there.

At the same time, American parenting approaches are becoming popular in Europe. The USA, being the only country in the World that has not and most probably will not ratify the UNCRC, does not believe in child agency. Parents can even be punished for what the Americans call free range parenting, parenting that believes in child agency. These ideas have first entered Europe at about the same time as the child rights movement started. As a result, there is already a younger adult generation, becoming parents or already young parents these days, who were not as free as children 40-50 years ago where. It seems that the generation of European parents who were born during or shortly after the WWII still understood that children are capable of a lot of things and can be trusted.

When families arrive from outside of Europe, their children often have experiences with the recognition of and support for their agency. They are often trusted much more than their European-born counterparts. So, why is it different at school? Why a whole large-scale project was built on supporting the agency of these children at school?

We believe that it is not a migrant issue, but rather an amalgam of different elements that are more prevalent in certain migrant children – not one-by-one, but present at the same time: social disadvantage, linguistic register, age and considering the multiple inclusion needs of the child. We say certain, because the whole picture changes if you don’t only focus on children who are third country national, but also on EU migrants. Why do we face different challenges in education when we look at for example Italian or Polish migrant children in the Netherland than when it is Syrian or – to stay within Europe – Ukrainian migrants.

There is a good reason why nearly all programmes that are designed to support the inclusion of Roma children in Eastern Europe work brilliantly for “migrant children”, more precisely for children who come from similarly difficult backgrounds, from challenging socio-economical situations, often have parents who have low education levels and fear from the “authority” school may have over them.

We have also experienced that the case is also similar when it comes to language. Teachers – while totally capable of adjusting their linguistic register to children – struggle with communicating with parents of these children. The reason is more often the linguistic register than the total lack of language skills. Again, what works in Roma inclusion, can also work in the case of migrant parents. Often, there is also a lack of related cultural knowledge on the teachers’ side, this is why our Parent’R’Us programme has been so successful – parents belonging to these groups, be it Roma or migrants – building the capacity of both their peers and that of teachers.

Linguistic register is a crucial question in designing classroom activities. A very important finding of research that our colleague, Luca László has emphasised often, shows that tackling children as “migrants” may mislead you in analysing learning outcomes as it easily leads to mixing up lower learning outcomes as a result of a child struggling with the vocabulary of Mathematics with having lower skills levels in Mathematics. A migrant child may already find it easy to communicate with their peers on everyday topics in the language of instruction, but may not have the vocabulary to express themselves in the language of certain subjects. Allowing children to work in the language they feel comfortable with leads to much better school results – and AI translation is already at a very high level, so teachers can easily understand what they are producing.

Very often migrant children are considered as one block, but just in the case of any other children, their agency is developing over time, thus the age of children is an important factor in considering their agency. In this, parents are again crucial as in the case of young children, especially with yet limited capacity, they are the ones who can facilitate agency. It starts really early. We know from research that even 2-year-olds are capable of establishing rules in their playgroup and also of keeping to these rules. This is a crucial moment as it is the age (sometime between 18 months and 2 years) when self-awareness is born.

One last element that is often neglected when a project or programme is tackling migrant children en bloc. Being migrant is just one factor in the needs of a child. If you don’t remember that a migrant child may also e.g. be physically disabled, dyslexic or especially talented in Mathematics, and you include them in a “migrant” programme, the needs of the child will not be met.

Thus it is crucial to have a holistic approach to child agency that is built on considering the multiple inclusion needs of each child, be them migrants coming from third countries or anybody else. What the Child Up project calls “hybrid integration” is a totally unnecessary discrimination of migrant children or just what we mean by inclusion. As inclusion is a term that we have been trying to make policy makers and practitioners understand and implement for a long time, and there are improvements, introducing a new, difficult-to-understand and mostly superfluous term may do more harm than good.