In a year shaped by fast-moving challenges for children, families, and schools, it is easy for meaningful work to become fragmented across meetings, projects, and publications. To make our work easier to follow and easier to use, we have compiled a single, navigable overview: “Where the Year Took Us”.

This Parents International resource summarises what we delivered in 2025 across research, advocacy, training, and EU-funded collaboration. It is designed for parents’ representatives, educators, school leaders, researchers, and policymakers who want a clear picture of where we worked, what we produced, and how each strand connects to practical impact for children and their families.

Parents International in 2025 at a glance

The report opens with a concise snapshot of the year. In 2025, Parents International reached 16 countries through 31 engagements, contributed to 8 EU-funded projects, developed 3 handbooks, and submitted 6 research papers.

These figures matter because they reflect a strategic choice: we aim to ensure that the parental voice is present where evidence is produced and where policies are shaped, while also translating research into tools that can be applied in schools and at home.

Where the year took us

A dedicated section lists our engagements across countries and cities, from conferences and forums to workshops and targeted training sessions. The 2025 map includes events and meetings in Belgium, Cyprus, France, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia, Spain, and Uganda.

This geographic spread is not a tourism narrative. It reflects how our work operates in practice: building partnerships, testing approaches in real settings, and ensuring that guidance is informed by lived experience, professional realities, and the evidence produced through pilots and evaluation.

Projects that made scale possible

The report explains how collaborative, publicly funded projects enable Parents International to test ideas at scale, identify what works, and share results in usable formats. It also clarifies the purpose of this approach: connecting universities, schools, civil society, and decision makers so parental engagement and child participation are treated as core factors in educational quality, wellbeing, and rights protection.

In 2025, the highlighted projects include:

• PARTICIPATE, training doctoral researchers to advance parent-focused cyberbullying prevention, policy, and practice.
• DRONE, strengthening digital literacy and resilience to disinformation through research, piloting, and training for teachers and parents.
• DEMOCRAT and EFFEct, supporting rigorous work on democratic education and the evaluation of education systems and policies.
• Kitchen Adventure, combining culinary learning, family bonding, healthier diets, and sustainability.
• BioBeo Foodity, developing education on lifestyle, circularity, and bioeconomy, including practical approaches to healthier and more sustainable cooking.
• PERFECT, developing transversal competences through local history projects that link arts and digital skills.

Across these initiatives, the shared objective is consistent: strengthen learning ecosystems through partnership, practical tools, and evidence that can withstand scrutiny.

Handbooks and resources that translate evidence into practice

A core message in the report is that resources must be more than well-intended advice. In 2025, Parents International developed three key resources as part of EU-funded project work: BioBeo Guide, The Missing Link, and A Guide to Introducing Potentially Traumatic Topics.

The report is explicit about quality standards: these are research-based, validated materials, built through international collaboration, piloting, and evaluation, then shaped into guidance and tools that are ready to be adapted by educators, school leaders, and families in different contexts.

It also points readers to the wider ecosystem of materials available through the Parent Library, reinforcing a principle we return to consistently: good practice must be usable, not merely persuasive.

Research output grounded in real-world questions

As a research institution, Parents International contributed to studies across its core themes, including parental engagement, inclusion, bullying and cyberbullying prevention, and effective approaches to education. The report lists six papers submitted for publication in 2025, covering topics such as community learning and digital literacy, parenthood across cultures, online safety and AI challenges, parents as child-rights advocates, migrant parent participation, and lessons from fractured education ecosystems.

Several entries emphasise a recurring conclusion across project data: families play a central role in children’s digital lives, while many schools still need stronger preparation and partnership structures to meet current demands.

Highlights from 2025

The highlights section captures what our public engagements are intended to achieve: sharing evidence and experience, translating research into usable guidance, and bringing parental perspectives into spaces where decisions are made.

Among the featured examples:

• At the World Anti-Bullying Forum in Stavanger, a doctoral candidate presented a scoping review on whether witnessing or experiencing adults’ violence or bullying is linked to later peer-bullying perpetration.
• Two online sessions at the VII Global Stop Cyberbullying Telesummit examined adults’ roles in cyberbullying, including how parents and teachers can act as both protectors and perpetrators, and how teacher bullying can remain hidden while harming children’s trust.
• A webinar co-organised by the Council of Europe and European Schoolnet, within the European Year of Digital Citizenship Education 2025, focused on digital wellbeing and amplifying young people’s voices, with Parents International highlighting parents as key drivers of children’s digital wellbeing.

How to use this resource

“Where the Year Took Us” is designed to be browsed quickly and revisited. The report invites readers to click through linked content to explore projects, resources, and publications in more depth.

If you work with families, schools, or education policy, we encourage you to use the report as:

• a concise overview of Parents International’s priorities in 2025,
• a gateway to validated resources and practical guidance,
• a reference point for partners who want evidence-informed collaboration.

Download and explore “Parents International 2025: Where the Year Took Us” and share it with your network.

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UNESCO symposium on the future of the right to education

The last 2025 event Parents International was represented at was a high-level symposium at the Paris headquarters of UNESCO on the future of the right to education. Representatives of governments from all over the world, key stakeholder representatives and international organisations working in the field of education and child rights gathered to discuss the implications of the freshly launched report “The right to education – Past, present and future directions“.

Participants all believe that education is one of the most powerful drivers of societal progress, social cohesion, and individual development, and that the right to education is at a pivotal crossroads. The report takes stock of 25 years of advancement in realizing that right, documenting significant achievements including the near-universalization of primary schooling, the expansion of formal learning opportunities from early childhood to higher education, and the increasing recognition of lifelong learning as a foundation for human and social development.

At the same time, profound changes in how we live, work, and learn have placed education systems under intense pressure to evolve rapidly. The report examines how digitalization, conflict, migration, and demographic shifts are reshaping the landscape of the right to education, with particular implications for vulnerable populations.

In the spirit of the 2015 UNESCO publication Rethinking education: towards a global common good?,it calls for renewed global commitment – not only by state actors and not only in the formal education system – to strengthening the legal and institutional underpinnings of the right to education, addressing persistent inequities, and preparing systems for emerging demographic, technological, and societal challenges.

Progress, pressure and the future of the Right to Education

Participants agreed that education can only continue to serve as both a protective and transformative force for all if all these dimensions are reinforced.

It was a welcome feature of the event that the role of parents and the need to support them as educators was emphasised by many. Most of the speakers highlighted the importance of having a holistic view on education, and acknowledging that formal education is only a part of educational journeys with non-formal and informal education being often far more impactful on the learning of a person. A major emphasis was on the need for people to become lifelong learners – and that it requires students to remain open and curious.

The only disappointing part of the event was the final panel where the representative of France, the only developed country where religious Muslim girls and Jewish boys are excluded from public education talked about the importance of accessible and inclusive public education, and the representative of Mauritania said “education is classroom, students and teachers” after a full day of discussing it is not.

The global learning crisis, flagged by the World Bank back in 2018, was mentioned multiple times. The situation has only worsened with a growing percentage of children attending school and not acquiring basic reading, writing and numeracy skills. Access to school has improved, school is nearly universally available to all primary aged children, but the number of children out of school, often as a conscious parental decision is growing. This is something we have been highlighting since 2020 through our involvement in the Worldwide Commission to Educate All Kids.

Parents International, relevance of school, and repairing education ecosystems

Another key issue raised by many – very much in line with what we have been advocating for – is the decreasing relevance of school curricula and the need to renew them to make school relevant and attractive again. We are definitely not doing well here. Recent research shows that while 2 to 5 year old children may ask an average of 107 questions per hour when they are awake, this goes down to a maximum 2 after starting school. We also see from our own research and talking to parents that schools cannot yet provide for education in crucial current areas such as digital literacy.

We got a lot of food for thought, and also valuable global data that tells us that the Parents International team is working on very topical issues. It is also clear that our advocacy for being precise and careful when using certain phrases is important. It is clear that the currently broken education ecosystems can only be repaired if we don’t mean schooling only when mentioning education, and we don’t only mean teachers when saying educators. This closing event of the busy and productive year of 2025 set the tone and gave us motivation for 2026.

More from Parents International

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Parents as Educators for Global Literacy Solutions

Parental Engagement: Listening First, Partnering Always