Reimagining Schools as Living Ecosystems

Cover image illustrating schools as a living ecosystem, showing interconnected elements that represent the whole-school approach to learning and wellbeing. — *Schools as living ecosystems – a visual metaphor for the whole-school approach, where learners, families, teachers and communities work together as one interconnected system.*

Schools today face unprecedented government pressure to provide high-quality education, ensure inclusion and prevent rising dropout rates. At the same time, families are showing increasing dissatisfaction with schooling provision. Recent crises, especially the migrant crises and the school closures of 2020–2022, have revealed how fragile the education ecosystem is – particularly when schools operate in isolation from families and communities.

Teachers and school leaders across Europe need to address a twofold challenge: how to embrace diversity as a strength and how to repair the broken links that push young people out of school, a decision often heavily supported by their parents. Research shows that a whole-school approach is key to managing both of these challenges.

This demands a paradigm shift: embracing a whole-school approach in a way that enables the balancing of academic goals with social-emotional development, making cultural inclusion a reality and providing the context for active and genuine student and parent engagement. In this article, we’re focusing on two pressing challenges – nurturing multicultural understanding through the arts and preventing dropout by repairing broken educational ecosystems.

Arts as a bridge to multicultural understanding and engagement

Why arts matter in schools

Students bring increasingly diverse and multiple cultural identities, languages and lived experiences to the classroom. Diversity enriches school life, but can also create tensions or even exclusion when not properly addressed. The arts – music, theatre, dance, visual arts – can provide a natural, often non-verbal medium for dialogue and empathy between cultures.

Research highlights that multicultural education cannot succeed if it is treated as a one-off project or festival. Rather, it must be embedded in a whole-school ethos and daily practice. The arts are uniquely positioned here: they invite participation, encourage perspective-taking and create shared products that celebrate cultural differences while fostering belonging. Our research during the school closure periods also shows that parents consider arts to be an area that schools should focus on more for them to be satisfied with its provisions.

Strategies for schools

Teachers and school leaders seeking to embed arts-based multicultural inclusion in their schools might find the following whole-school strategies helpful:

Curriculum integration: Integrate multicultural arts projects across subjects, rather than confining them to extracurricular activities.
- For example, history lessons can incorporate theatrical reenactments of different community narratives, while science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) can be made more attractive through storytelling.
Student-led initiatives: Empower students to showcase their heritage – engaging their families on the way – through performances or exhibitions, positioning them as cultural experts rather than passive learners.
Family and community engagement: Invite parents and community artists to co-create projects – this shifts parental participation from involvement to engagement, from tokenistic gestures to genuine and equal education partnerships.
Safe spaces for dialogue: Use arts-based workshops to enable students to explore sensitive topics like migration, identity and discrimination in a constructive way.

A whole-school arts programme that embeds multicultural inclusion goes beyond representation. It creates belonging, a critical factor in school engagement and reducing dropout risk. It also provides the necessary basis for parents to feel that schools value them as their children’s first and most impactful educators.

Dropout as a symptom of a broken ecosystem

Understanding the ‘broken education ecosystem’

High dropout rates are rarely related to individual failure, especially since it is a conscious family decision in an increasing number of cases. They reflect systemic breakdowns in the educational ecosystem, such as a lack of understanding of the role of educators outside of the school, weak connections between schools, families and communities, misaligned expectations and a lack of trust.

Research in Hungary and the Netherlands found sharp discrepancies between how parents, teachers and students view the purpose of schooling. While teachers often assume parents care primarily about academic results, many value social-emotional growth and fair assessment far more, and students’ voices reflect those of their parents rather than those of their teachers. These misalignments erode trust and fuel disengagement.

Moreover, teachers often perceive parents as disinterested, while parents report feeling unwelcome or unheard in schools. Barriers such as time, communication gaps and cultural misunderstandings leave families alienated, weakening the support network that students need to succeed.

Repairing the ecosystem: the whole-school lens

To prevent dropout, schools need to repair these fractures through a whole-school, ecosystem-focused approach that includes:

Meaningful and flexible family engagement: Shifting from ‘parental involvement’ (attending events, following rules) to ‘parental engagement’ (co-deciding, co-creating learning experiences) is essential. School boards, parent councils and similar structures should include not only compliant, ‘tame’ parents but diverse voices that mayquestion school norms. Schools should adapt to families’ availability and communication styles, bridging any gaps with digital tools, multilingual resources and community mediators. At the same time, similar procedures should be applied to students, and not in isolation from their parents.

Redefinition of success: Schools need to move beyond academic achievement to include social-emotional learning, citizenship and readiness for real life. Dropout is often a rational choice when students and their families find school irrelevant.

Inclusive leadership: School leaders should set the tone by modelling openness and ensuring all staff value collaboration, encouraging a culture where families feel they belong.

Teacher professional development: Teacher training programmes currently lack focus on parental engagement and working with diverse families, and teachers need support in this area.

Linking arts, inclusion and dropout prevention

Schools that integrate arts-based practices, especially in a multicultural context, create stronger bonds between students, families and the community. These help build a resilient education ecosystem and address disconnection, which is one of the root causes of dropout.

The aim is to validate the lived experiences of families and strengthen their trust in schools, offering solutions to bridge language gaps while celebrating the richness of diversity among families – in home cultures, languages or values (e.g. celebrating vocational learning paths, not only academic ones).

Parents who feel engaged will provide positive motivation about school to their children – the primary factor in school success. Students who feel seen, valued and included are far less likely to disengage.

Implications for teachers and school leaders

For teachers, the call is to integrate inclusive practices such as arts-based methodologies and student and parent engagement into everyday teaching. They need to see families as co-equal educators rather than outsiders to the school community, and they need to work on themselves to be able to do this. For school leaders, the responsibility is systemic – building inclusive school structures, training staff and modelling engagement.

Practical steps include:

auditing current school practices for inclusivity and student-parent engagement

building a shared vision of the purpose of schooling with staff, parents and students

allocating resources for arts projects that aim to foster multicultural understanding

providing professional development on ecosystem thinking and equal partnerships

Preventing dropout and fostering inclusion are not separate agenda points – schools need to move away from fragmented practices and towards whole-school, ecosystemic approaches. The arts can provide a powerful, practical entry point to inclusion, and authentic family engagement can help repair broken trust and ensure that schools remain relevant to most families.

As research shows, students and their families are not disinterested – they are waiting to be welcomed as equal partners by schools. By repairing the broken educational ecosystem, teachers and school leaders can ensure that school is a place where every student not only stays, but strives – and arts-based inclusion is a successful first step towards this.

Eszter Salamon

(This content was originally published as an expert article on Europen School Education Platform)

Bibliography

Bronfenbrenner, U. (2005). Making human beings human: Bioecological perspectives on human development. Sage. Thousand Oaks, CA.

Dewey, J. (1953). The school and society. University of Chicago Press. Chicago.

Kelly, P. (2019). Teacher recruitment, retention and motivation in Europe, EEPN, Utrecht.

Morris, E.M. et al. (2024). Six Global Lessons on How Family, School, and Community Engagement Can Transform Education. Brookings Institution, Washington D.C.

Salamon E. -Haider B. (2015, 2019). Parental involvement in school and education governance, EPA. Brussels and IPA, Sassenheim.

Salamon, E., Horgas, J. (2024). Engagement report covering youth and family. BioBeo Project, Dublin.

Salamon, E. (2019). Good practices in teacher and school leader career pathways in Europe from a practitioner and parent perspective, EEPN, Utrecht.

Salamon, E. (2020). A New Deal between Parents and Professionals Using COVID-19 Learnings as Leverage. Social Education 53(1): 6-25, Kaunas.

Sengeh, D.M., Winthrop, R. (2022). Transforming Education Systems: Why, what, and how. Brookings Institution. Education Plus Development, Washington D. C.

Studin, I. (2024). Never Close the Schools Again. Ever! I21CQ, Toronto.

World Bank. (2018). World Development Report 2018: Learning to Realize Education’s Promise. Washington, D.C.: World Bank.