A great team for a great workshop

It’s the 6th of November. I’ve just landed at the busy-as-usual Schiphol airport and I’m heading towards the Farm Kitchen in Hoofddorp to take part in Project DRONE’s handbook validation workshop. As the lift reaches the 19th floor, appropriately called “Lighthouse”, my gaze stretches across the outer rim of the city, surrounded by the green Dutch countryside that will soon be engulfed in the thick fogs of autumn. “One of those four-seasons-in-a-day days,” quips our director, Eszter Salamon.

We are soon joined by our colleagues from all over Europe. It’s not your usual meeting in which people sit quietly, waiting for their turn to speak. This is a workshop in the style of Parents International: engaging, hands-on, and experiential. It’s designed to be inclusive in the purest sense of the word: we are a parent organisation, and one of our team members is breastfeeding. Far from being a complication, having a toddler in the room is a sweet reminder of the principles we embrace and the objectives we pursue.

Having such a great team and capable facilitators means that I can even sneak out for a short time to speak at the webinar Digital Citizenship Education in Practice:  Well-being Online and the Voice of Young People hosted by the Council of Europe and the digi.well project as part of the European Year of Digital Citizenship Education 2025.

Over the course of two days, we analysed the guides thoroughly from multiple perspectives. We discussed content, tone, design, and we even deployed role-play techniques to brainstorm ideas and identify areas of improvement.

But, you might ask, what are these guides, and what is DRONE?

The DRONE Project

Project DRONE is an Erasmus+ research and innovation project that puts digital literacy and disinformation resilience at the heart of European education. Its full title says it all: Teacher and school leaders training to promote Digital liteRacy and combat the spread of disinfOrmation among vulNerable groups of adolEscents.

It runs across several European countries and brings together universities, school leadership organisations and parent associations with one goal: equip schools with practical, research-based tools to help young people think critically about what they see online, recognise fake news, and navigate AI-powered platforms safely.

To meet this ambitious goal, DRONE:

• maps gaps in current practice,
• conducts large-scale field research with students, teachers, school leaders and parents.
• develops and pilots training programmes, handbooks and an e-learning platform for professional educators, as well as resources tailored to families and policy-makers.

The project works on three interconnected levels:

1. the disinformation ecosystem (how false information spreads and influences choices)
2. the human development ecosystem (building students’ and adults’ critical thinking and resilience)
3. the whole-school ecosystem, with special attention to vulnerable groups of adolescents.

The guides

The guides and manuals we are validating in this workshop are one of the project’s key outputs. They are designed to turn robust evidence into concrete support for classrooms, school leadership and families.

Parents

The DRONE Parents Handbook is a practical guide for parents and carers who want to feel more confident about their children’s digital lives – without needing to be tech experts. Developed from DRONE’s research with students, families and schools, it starts from a simple idea: parents are not just “gatekeepers,” but mentors, role models and partners in learning.

The handbook walks you step by step through the key building blocks of digital literacy and disinformation from a family perspective. Early chapters explain information literacy and the differences between misinformation, disinformation and “fake news,” using clear examples, case studies and everyday situations (for instance, a relative sharing a dubious health tip or a teenager discovering a viral conspiracy video). Parents are given concrete questions, checklists and “family challenges” to help them practise fact-checking and source evaluation together with their children.

Central chapters focus on resilience, problem-solving and critical thinking in the digital age. They show how online life affects emotions, identity and relationships, and offer tools like the “Resilience Roadmap,” simple problem-solving frameworks (STOP – THINK – CHOOSE – CHECK, DEAR), conversation starters and coping strategies for when things go wrong. Real-life scenarios – exclusion from a group chat, viral challenges, hacked accounts – are used to guide parents through calm, constructive responses.

The handbook also tackles bullying and cyberbullying, cybersecurity and building alliances. It recognises that harm can come from peers, adults or family members, and suggests ways for parents to work with schools, community organisations and other carers. Practical annexes and policy templates help families and school leaders align expectations and create safer digital environments together.

School Leaders

The DRONE School Leaders Handbook is the second volume in the DRONE series, designed specifically for heads, principals and leadership teams who want to make digital literacy and disinformation a strategic whole-school priority – not just an add-on lesson.

Grounded in DRONE’s research, it starts from a clear message: school leaders are pivotal. Leadership attitudes and decisions shape whether digital literacy is embedded across curriculum, safeguarding and communication – or left to isolated, one-off activities. The opening sections translate “Key Messages from DRONE Research” into concrete leadership tasks: building coherent policies, supporting teachers, communicating transparently with parents, and constructing alliances with trusted partners.

The core of the handbook is organised into eight practical chapters: information literacy; disinformation, misinformation and fake news; resilience building; problem-solving; critical thinking; bullying and cyberbullying; cybersecurity; and building alliances. Each chapter explains why the topic matters for leaders, offers reflective questions (“self-check” tests), and then moves into highly practical tools: school-wide frameworks, ready-to-adapt procedures, case studies (“rumours in the community,” “the hacked account,” “the curriculum controversy”), and checklists leaders can use in staff meetings or strategic planning.

A substantial final section provides policy templates and frameworks – for example, a model cyberbullying policy, a digital literacy framework outline, and cybersecurity protocols – giving leaders a starting point they can tailor to their own school context and legal environment.

Teachers

The DRONE Teachers Handbook is the third volume in the series, created for teachers who are on the frontline of students’ digital lives and who need practical, classroom-ready support rather than abstract theory. It starts from DRONE’s key insight that students usually test new claims and viral content first in class – which makes teachers the first adults confronted with misinformation, online conflict and digital harm.

The handbook opens with research-based “Key Insights for Teachers” (teachers as role models, the need for continuous training, the emotional toll of digital pressure), then moves into eight core chapters: information literacy; disinformation, misinformation and fake news; resilience building; problem-solving in the digital world; critical thinking; bullying and cyberbullying; cybersecurity; and building alliances. Each chapter combines short explanation, self-reflection prompts, concrete classroom strategies, and rich case studies (for example: the “viral vaccine video” in biology, a rumour about a teacher, a fake health trend in PE, or the “flat Earth” debate in geography).

A distinctive feature of this volume is its strong lesson-plan toolkit: ready-made, adaptable activities on spotting fake news, building digital resilience, practising critical thinking online, and teaching cybersecurity basics. These come with clear objectives, timings, materials, step-by-step procedures and assessment ideas, so teachers can start using them immediately in primary or secondary classrooms. A final Teacher Quick Reference Guide distils key checklists and frameworks – from “Digital First Aid” steps to bullying warning signs, critical-thinking questions and alliance/e-safety checks – into a handy at-a-glance format.

Conclusions

Over the course of this workshop, we have discussed at length and analysed in depth the DRONE Handbooks. Their final versions are planned for release in multiple European languages by around March 2026, so that parents, teachers and school leaders across Europe can rely on a shared, research-based and highly practical resource to build digital literacy, resilience and safe, critical classrooms.

We are now looking forward to some high-intensity months, finalising the layout and developing effective, user-friendly illustrations. We will keep you posted – so stay tuned!

Emanuele Bertolani

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Parents’ Perspectives on Digital Literacy, AI, and Better-prepared Teachers

Digital Citizenship Education: A Bold Step Toward a Smarter Future

Parents – inspiring protagonists of cyberbullying prevention

The VII Global StopCyberbullying Telesummit

In October 2025, the VII Global StopCyberbullying Telesummit hosted two special sessions led by Parents International experts who are currently working on the DRONE, PARTICIPATE, and EFFEct projects. On 7 October, Luca Janka Laszlo presented new research on “Bullying by Teachers”. One week later, on 14 October, Eszter Salamon spoke about “Perpetrator and Protector Roles of Parents and Teachers”. These sessions highlighted a reality that is too often ignored: adults aren’t only one of the first line of protection against bullying: in some cases, they are perpetrators themselves, and their example has a direct correlation to the adoption of bullying behaviour in children.

This is a crucial distinction for DRONE, an Erasmus+ project that trains teachers and school leaders to promote digital literacy and combat disinformation among vulnerable adolescents. Cyberbullying, hate and harassment do not exist in a vacuum; they are shaped by school culture, parenting practices and wider social norms. The telesummit discussions showed how research from PARTICIPATE, DRONE and EFFEct can be used to change those norms in practice.

What bullying by teachers looks like – and why it matters

Luca’s presentation started from a simple but uncomfortable observation: most anti-bullying programmes treat adults only as “protective factors”. They focus on peer-to-peer bullying and may refer to abuse at home, but rarely ask whether teachers or parents themselves bully children.

To address this gap, Luca adopted a broader definition of bullying as a damaging social process driven by power imbalances and social or institutional norms. Bullying involves unwanted behaviour that causes physical, social or emotional harm. It is often repeated over time, but this repetition – and the idea of clear, conscious intent – is not always straightforward in the case of cyberbullying or adult behaviour.

Within this framework, teacher bullying includes emotional violence, humiliation, deliberate ignoring of a child, verbal aggression, unfair treatment of property, physical aggression and, increasingly, online attacks. International research shows that this is a scattered but growing field: studies use very different concepts and measures, rely heavily on cross-sectional surveys and convenience samples, and report prevalence rates that range from below 1 per cent to almost 90 per cent depending on how questions are asked. This does not mean that teacher bullying is “everywhere”, but it does confirm that it is real, harmful and still poorly understood.

Luca presented data from surveys with almost 800 students in 25 schools across the Netherlands and Hungary. Children were asked about five domains:

• victimisation by peers
• victimisation by teachers
• victimisation by parents
• students’ own bullying of peers
• help-seeking

Across both countries, a substantial share of students reported at least occasional experiences of teacher behaviours such as misnaming, verbal aggression, ignoring a pupil who needed help, or other actions that felt humiliating or unfair. Some also reported physical aggression and teacher cyberbullying.

A scoping review of the literature suggests a worrying pattern: where teacher or other adult bullying is present, children are more likely to become (cyber)bullies themselves. Bandura’s social cognitive theory reminds us why this might happen. Children learn by observing adults; if adults use power to humiliate or intimidate, that behaviour can be normalised and repeated in peer relationships.

Parents and teachers: protectors, perpetrators, guides

Eszter Salamon’s session looked at parents and teachers from both angles: as potential perpetrators and as the most important protectors. Using recent PARTICIPATE data from Hungary and the Netherlands, she showed that cyberbullying is still mainly carried out by peers, but that a minority of students also report experiences of online bullying by parents or teachers.

Survey data from Hungary and the Netherlands show that bullying by adults is far from rare. Family bullying is reported as much more common in the Netherlands than in Hungary: 67.1 per cent of Dutch students, compared with 14.1 per cent of Hungarian students, say they have experienced it more than once or twice. Teacher bullying is widespread in both countries and reported as more prevalent in the Netherlands, with 70.1 per cent of students, compared with 54.2 per cent in Hungary, saying they have been bullied by a teacher more than once or twice.

When something goes wrong, whom do children trust? Here the findings are very clear. In the interviews, all participants said they would seek help from parents; some in Hungary expected their parents to involve teachers, but none placed primary trust in teachers. In an emergency, trust in parents was 100 per cent, in friends about 70 per cent, and in teachers effectively zero.

Additional data from the LIVITY Future Report, presented in the session, confirm the central role of parents. Around 63 per cent of young people who seek help about bullying turn to their parents, with even higher rates among 13–15-year-olds. Older teenagers are less likely to ask for parental help but still do so more than they turn to any school-based adult.

This pattern is repeated in the area of digital education. Many participants feel confident about using digital tools and checking information, and say they are supported by their parents but are doubtful about their teachers’ competence. When asked where they learn about healthy online habits, young people most often name parents (about one third), followed by friends. Only a small minority mention teachers as the main source of guidance on changing passwords, logging out of shared devices, sharing information responsibly or assessing the trustworthiness of online content.

For DRONE, PARTICIPATE and EFFEct, this has two important implications. First, parents must be recognised as key actors in cyberbullying prevention and digital literacy. Second, teachers and school leaders need support, both to avoid harmful practices and to become trusted adults in the digital lives of children.

From research to tools: what schools and families can use now

Both telesummit sessions also showcased very practical tools that already exist. Parents International has developed a suite of resources on bullying and cyberbullying prevention, many of them building on work from the SAILS project and now connected to DRONE and PARTICIPATE.

For parents, these include:

• clear explanations of bullying and cyberbullying, including warning signs
• guidance on helpful reactions – listening without judgement, validating the child’s experience, reinforcing the message “you are not to blame”
• step-by-step advice on documenting incidents, reporting to school and supporting emotional recovery, whether the child is a victim or a perpetrator
• practical tools such as checklists, action plans, family conversation starters and resilience roadmaps.

Resilience-building tools help families recognise digital stress, model healthy coping strategies and create habits that support balance. The underlying message is simple: prevention is not only about controlling devices, but about building trust, emotional awareness and supportive networks around the child.

For schools, training offers are emerging that address teacher bullying directly and link it to broader questions of school culture, leadership and data use – areas where EFFEct’s work on evidence-based education policy and DRONE’s focus on digital resilience provide a strong foundation.

How DRONE, PARTICIPATE and EFFEct move forward together

DRONE places these insights within a wider agenda: equipping teachers, school leaders, parents and students to recognise disinformation, understand artificial intelligence and navigate the online world critically, especially in vulnerable groups of adolescents. PARTICIPATE contributes cutting-edge research on the role of parents and other adults in cyberbullying, ensuring that interventions do not overlook those who hold the most power in children’s lives. EFFEct, finally, helps translate these findings into sound educational policy and practice by promoting rigorous, impact-driven research on what actually works in classrooms and schools.

The telesummit sessions made one conclusion unavoidable: children watch closely how adults use power, online and offline. When adults model respect, fairness and critical thinking, bullying and disinformation lose much of their force. When adults misuse power, even occasionally, the damage can last for years.

Through DRONE, PARTICIPATE, EFFEct and related initiatives, our goal is to ensure that parents, teachers and school leaders are equipped not only to prevent bullying and cyberbullying, but also to become the trusted guides that young people so clearly need in the digital age.

TOOLS TO SUPPORT FAMILIES AND SCHOOLS

Parent Action Plan

Conversation Starter Tools

Captain’s Handbook – SAILS resource for school leaders

SAILING MASTERS’ GUIDE TO NAVIGATING THE DIGITAL WORLD WITH YOUR CHILD – the SAILS Parent Resource

SAILS Inspiring Practice Analysis on Risk Mitigation in Digital Childhood

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The Center for Universal of Education at Brookings has developed and is piloting a set of conversation starter tools. It is a follow-up to the work done on the Playbook for Family-School Engagement that we were providing inspiration for and our Director contributed to it as a reviewer. During the summer and autumn of 2023, our researchers are piloting the tools in Hungary, Kazakhstan and the Netherlands.

The Conversation Starter Tools (CSTs) are a set of tools developed by CUE to guide school, jurisdiction, or community teams in facilitating data-informed conversations where they can talk about their beliefs on education and build relational trust. The Conversation Starter Tools guide teams in identifying educators’, parents’, and students’ beliefs on the purpose of school and what makes a quality education; valued pedagogical approaches; and level of trust, alignment, and engagement. The surveys data can vary depending on demographics, such as by gender and education levels of parents. These surveys do not judge or assess schools, but rather help teams understand beliefs and experiences to help inform more participatory and inclusive approaches to promoting family engagement.

For teams wanting to facilitate data-informed conversations, the process can be summarized in 4 steps:

1. Contextualize: This step involves determining why teams want to conduct surveys (purpose), who the respondents are (demographics + literacy levels), how the surveys will be administered (remote, in-person, hybrid), what needs to be modified for context (especially ensuring the surveys are translated into relevant languages), and whether findings will be used for research purposes.
2. Survey: Surveys are administered to parents, teachers, and students (for use with students over 14 years) either in-person or remotely. Data is analyzed and visualized.
3. Share data & discuss: Teams share findings from the surveys with respondent groups. Conversations are then organized among various actors to discuss the findings of the survey and their reflections and takeaways.
4. Strategize: Conversations are used to guide teams in building strategies to increase family engagement in their communities.

The current research is testing how the tools work in different schools and school systems and also how to translate various notions to local languages for better understanding. You can find the American version here: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Conversation_Starter_Tools_eng_FINAL.pdf

We will share our research outcomes with you towards the end of the year.

In November 2022, the European Education Policy Network on Teachers and School Leaders (EEPN) held its Annual Conference in Trim, Ireland. At the time, nearly 80 education professionals, researchers, and policymakers gathered to explore a transformative theme: teachers and school leaders towards a sustainable Whole School Approach (WSA) for inclusive, high-quality education.

Now, in 2025, as European education systems continue to recover, adapt, and evolve in the face of global crises and demographic shifts, the conclusions drawn from that event are proving more relevant—and more urgent—than ever before.

Looking Back, Moving Forward: The Enduring Relevance of EEPN 2022

The 2022 conference was far from just a routine academic gathering. It produced research and policy insights that have since shaped education development across the continent. Its forward-thinking focus on community building, equity, and whole-school transformation laid a foundation that, three years on, is still guiding schools through the complex realities of the post-pandemic era.

Parents International, a key partner in the EEPN network, was proud to contribute to the conference and to see its work on meaningful parental engagement featured in the research portfolio. Today, we reaffirm our commitment to this vision and call on school leaders and policymakers to revisit those findings—not as past reflections, but as a blueprint for today’s solutions.

EEPN’s Research Focus: Still the Right Questions

At the heart of the 2022 conference were five interconnected areas of focus that remain strikingly relevant in 2025:

• Teachers’ and school leaders’ competences and support for effective blended learning: As hybrid education becomes a permanent fixture, schools need sustainable strategies—not emergency responses.
• A whole school support and networking to ensure school success for all: With increasing inequality, schools need strong internal and external networks to support every learner.
• A whole school approach for sustainable development, with a focus on the role and competences of school leaders: Climate, digitalisation, and migration challenges require schools to lead with sustainability and inclusivity.
• Schools as learning communities to support teachers’ and school leaders’ professional learning and well-being: Burnout remains a serious threat. Schools must become spaces where educators thrive, not just survive.
• The EEPN policy recommendations: These serve as a clear roadmap for turning research into practice at scale.

Each of these themes intersects with today’s educational priorities, reaffirming that the Whole School Approach isn’t just a theory—it’s the system 21st-century schools need.

Whole School Thinking for a Whole New Reality

The urgency of 2025 demands more than small-scale interventions. Schools are navigating increased migration, youth mental health crises, widening digital divides, and the pressing need for environmental literacy. In this landscape, fragmented efforts fail. What’s needed is a holistic approach that brings coherence, inclusion, and collective responsibility to the entire school environment.

This is what the Whole School Approach offers.

WSA is not about occasional wellbeing programs or adding sustainability to the timetable. It’s about ensuring that every aspect of school life—leadership, pedagogy, relationships, policies, and community links—reflects shared values of inclusion, equity, and empowerment. And crucially, it invites families to be active co-creators in that process.

Families: From Margins to the Centre

One of the strongest messages from the 2022 conference—and one that resonates even more deeply now—was that parents and families must be at the centre of school transformation.

When Peter Kelly (Plymouth University) summarised the EEPN research, he identified community-building, active participation, and shared leadership as key drivers of educational change. In all of these, families play a vital role. Initiatives like Parent’R’Us exemplify how parent leadership and collaboration can strengthen schools—not just by increasing engagement, but by deepening mutual respect between families and educators.

In 2025, these partnerships are no longer a ‘nice to have’—they’re essential. Today’s students face social complexity, environmental instability, and digital saturation. Schools cannot support them alone. Families bring context, culture, continuity, and care—assets that schools must integrate, not overlook.

Leadership with Courage and Vision

Another theme that has grown more pressing since 2022 is the need for strong, inclusive school leadership. As we face escalating demands and limited resources, school leaders must move beyond administrative functions. They must become facilitators of collaboration, supporting staff, students, and families in building resilient learning communities.

The EEPN policy recommendations laid out concrete ways to support leaders in this role—from professional development to wellbeing strategies and cross-sector partnerships. Schools that have embraced these principles are showing greater adaptability and stronger staff retention, even amid ongoing stressors.

The Path Ahead: Action, Not Aspiration

Three years on from the EEPN conference, it’s clearer than ever: the Whole School Approach isn’t just timely—it’s timeless. In 2025, its principles align with the challenges schools face every day. And its power lies in the simple truth that education works best when it is collaborative, caring, and community-based.

At Parents International, we continue to champion the WSA model. We advocate for policies that embed parental partnership, support inclusive leadership, and empower schools to serve all learners. The 2022 EEPN conference gave us the evidence. Now, it’s time to act.

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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.

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 and education. It is a crucial element of their inclusion. We were invited to contribute on practice related to this topic. The input from IPA Director, Eszter Salamon, was highlighting 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 historical look at how much adults have trusted children that they are capable of doing things. Jesper Juul, the renowned 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 behaves: 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 in 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 railings about a century ago. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) is only a little over 30 years old, and children – especially younger children – are unlikely to start a juvenile suffragette-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 migrant children and education, it will not take more than a hundred years, but in this area again, we are very far from being there.

American Parenting Trends and Their Impact on Migrant Children and Education

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 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. It seems that the generation of European parents who were born during or shortly after WWII still understood that children are capable of a lot of things and can be trusted. This perspective significantly impacts the way we address migrant children and education today.

Migrant Children and Education: Challenges

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 was a whole large-scale project 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 nationals 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 Netherlands than when it is Syrian or – to stay within Europe – Ukrainian migrants? This complexity underlines the necessity of nuanced approaches to migrant children and education.

Holistic Approaches to Inclusion and Child Agency

There is a good reason why nearly all programs 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. These children often have parents who have low education levels and fear the “authority” school may have over them.

We have also experienced that the case is 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.

Linguistic register is a crucial question in designing classroom activities. A very important finding of research that our colleague, Luca László, has emphasized often shows that tackling children as “migrants” may mislead you in analyzing 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. 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.

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Safer Internet Day 2022 message by Parents International

Safer Internet Day is observed on the 8 February each year, and Parents International is a long-term supporter of the initiative constantly calling attention to a balance of rights and actions, and the crucial role of parents in ensuring it. In 2022 Safer Internet Day is again about “Together for a better internet. The United Kingdom has decided to focus on using technology responsibly, respectfully, critically, and creatively, a very timely initiative. Our annual message is closely connected to this.

In 2021, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child adopted a General Comment concerning children’s rights in digital environments. In this document, it is highlighted that all children’s rights should be given due weight, thus including the right to seek, receive and impart information, not only that to be protected from harm. In no particular order of importance, the following rights are, or should be, most impactful in the online environment:

• The right to free expression (Article 13).
• The right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion (Article 14).
• The right to freedom of association and peaceful assembly (Article 15).
• The right to privacy (Article 16).
• The right to access to information (Article 17).
• The right to education (Article 28).
• The right to leisure, play, and culture (Article 31).
• The right to protection from economic, sexual, and other types of exploitation (Articles 32, 34, and 36, respectively).

Parents as primary educators of their children, and as primary protectors and enablers of children’s rights play a very important role in finding the right balance. According to recent research (EEPN 2021, OECD 2021, CoE 2021), in general parents are already better suited for this than professional educators. With the teaching force becoming older in most parts of the world, a growing percentage of parents are already ‘digital natives’, have been using digital technologies extensively all their lives. This needs a rethinking and shifting roles with teachers and other professional educators becoming lifelong learners learning from parents as well as other sources. Parents are present and wish to be engaged, this has also been proven by research (Brookings 2021, IPA 2021), thus it seems obvious for schools to become open to the opportunity of learning from parents.

For the much-needed respect, responsibility, critical thinking and creativity, educators – both professionals and parents – need to develop their skills in these fields. Research clearly shows that professional educators tend to be less entrepreneurial than people in other professions – meaning that parents are likely to be more creative, resilient, ready to take initiative, to think outside of the box or be collaborative. It is also clear from research, that teachers are less able to think critically, namely eg. to differentiate between fact an opinion, than the general population, the parents.

However, parents still need support in further developing these competences, and our recent research shows that there are very few initiatives targeting parents that implement the balanced risk mitigation approach instead of pushing for risk prevention at the cost of all other rights – and most of them come from industry. Parents International has joined the SAILS consortium to develop resources for parents of school-aged children, after being part of a similar initiative targeting parents of very young children with a similar approach (DigiLitEy). The resource will soon be available for all.

To foster neighbouring skills and competences, we have also been active in and promoted entrepreneurial parenting. On Safer Internet Day 2022, our ParENTrepreneurs trainings and collaborative learning platform are more topical than ever.

We are calling all other stakeholders and Safer Internet Day supporters to promote these tools and to use parents as a resource for their own learning for an internet where we really can be together in an unrestricted, but still safe way.

Parents International partnered with the COVIDEA initiative to present the #NewEducatioDeal at the Fundamental Rights Forum that was held mostly online. The session we conducted was entitled A new education deal after Covid-19.

Access to quality education is a fundamental right also enshrined in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG4). The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of digital technology, but also revealed shortcomings related to connectivity, privacy and other issues. Moreover, the pandemic as well as the ongoing climate crisis make clear that there is a need for a shift from knowledge accumulation to character, judgement and resilience building. This session presents two mutually supportive education reform initiatives, the New Education Deal promoted by Parents International and COVIDEA-The COVID Education Alliance respectively.

In the session the research and call for action in our #NewEducationDeal initiative were presented together with the key elements of the COVIDEA Primer Parents International is supporting.

If you missed the session, the recording it available – the only advantage of online events – here.

International Day of Families 2021 message by Parents International

A year ago, Parents international published a global action plan for the post-covid era. Although in many countries, restrictions are still in place, we are working even harder on going back to our old normal with some changes that benefit our children more. As every year, we celebrate the International Day of Families on 15 May that now focuses on the well-being of families and the impact of new technologies on this. The United Nations has also acknowledged in its annual message the need for governments to shift their focus to empowering parents, the primary educators of their children. Thus, we have even more reason to celebrate this important day in 2021 hoping that the approach we have been promoting, focusing on parents first and foremost will become mainstream in policy and practice. We are using this opportunity to highlight some achievements and also to call the attention to some challenges that need our attention as well as the attention of policy makers in the coming years.

The focus on new technologies and their impact on families’ well-being is accompanied by another important act by the United Nations. General Comment No. 25 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has just been published. This General Comment is a major step in acknowledging child rights in the online world, finally moving in the direction Parents International has advocated for many years. The document stops focusing on the risks only, and highlights children’s civil rights and freedoms, including rights to privacy, non-discrimination, peaceful assembly, education, play and weights them against the right to protection. It also highlights very clearly the rights and duties of parents in this field being primarily responsible for protecting all these rights as well as providing supportive guidance. This is a major step, and we at Parents International are proud we were contributors to this General Comment.

Digital technologies became part of daily life for millions of families more than they had been before lockdowns and school closures although there are huge inequalities in access to technology and services. As we have seen from research done at various points of the past more than a year, families clearly see the benefits of using them, but are also very careful to see a healthy balance between traditional and digital means in education, communication, work, play, and other fields of life. It has also become clear that well-being largely depends on developing various competences of both children and adults – parents and professionals alike -, for example critical thinking, active participation, collaboration, self-care, resilience and civic activism if necessary. These are the areas that initiatives referenced by the UN annual message should focus.

Parents International is ready to share our knowledge, experience and methodologies for trainings, coaching and mentoring by professionals as well as peers who also need to be empowered for that, while we are eager to learn from others. As part of fulfilling our call for action #ParentsFirst – #NewEducationDeal we have continued developing trainings for parents and for professionals working with them. We believe – contrary to what the UN message is implying – that especially for parents with challenging backgrounds there must be ways of improving their parenting skills in face-to-face rather than online environments, while the benefits of digital technologies can still be exploited to a certain extent. We still need to focus on training the professionals who can then in turn train and empower hundreds or thousands of parents each. In this spirit, during the last year we have partnered up with various initiatives and institutions from India to Europe, from Jordan to the United States of America, and will continue to widen this network. One of our partners, the HundrED community is currently evaluating parenting support initiatives, and we are proud to be on the expert jury for that. We have also teamed up with UN experts and subsequently digital technology providers for better education provisions. We have pledged for putting parenting skills in the limelight not only at international days and similar initiatives, but also by showing the multitude of them and their value even for the labour market.

In the past year, we have highlighted various areas where parents were left alone and governments – as well as other branches of power – have miserably failed. It is high time for centres of power to evaluate, ask for forgiveness, and start collaborating with and relying on parents. On the International Day of Families 2021, we are asking governments, intergovernmental institutions, school leaders, teachers, professionals and also the general public to acknowledge that parents are key to a future for our children that they enjoy at the highest level of well-being possible.

Children’s mental health has been jeopardised more than ever in this last one year, and the internet is very much to be blamed for this – but probably not in ways you would first assume. Parents and carers are as much guilty of making our children the victims of pandemic propaganda as teachers and other professionals. While there is a need for a wider coalition to prevent mass and social media from becoming scaremongers of massive proportions ever again, being a parents’ organisation our duty on Safer Internet Day is to highlight the need for parents and carers to be supported in order to become critical thinkers and thus enable them to protect children if anything like this ever happens again in the future. 2020 has shown us that we need to find ways of making down-to-earth, often undereducated people’s voices heard to counterbalance harms caused by messages spreading on the internet.

Child psychiatrists[i] have called the attention of the public to an unprecedented number of acute cases filling specialised hospital wards all over Europe. Many countries are reporting a dramatic increase in child suicide[ii] and PTSD[iii] is becoming a condition for large numbers of children. This is due to children being prevented from normal social life as much as the mantra of children being “granny killers” and making them pathologically afraid of a virus of nearly zero danger to them. While scientific evidence[iv] clearly shows that children neither need to be prevented from playing together, nor have a role in spreading the Covid-19 virus to the elderly, mass media was pushing messages that were contrary to facts.

Critical thinking is a core competence defined in the LifeComp[v] published by the European Union as “assessment of information and arguments to support reasoned conclusions and develop innovative solutions”. Other definitions include “Critical thinking is the act of analysing facts to understand a problem or topic thoroughly” and “Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skilfully conceptualizing, applying, analysing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.” The Council of Europe’s active citizenship framework directly links critical thinking to personal responsibility that is also a responsibility of parents for the minors they raise.

Critical thinking includes identification of prejudice, bias, propaganda, self-deception, distortion, misinformation, and this was a nearly impossible task for many in the past year, and there are very good reasons for this. As described by Nobel Prize winning social psychologists Daniel Kahneman[vi] and Richard Thaler[vii], people tend to think unilaterally and highly overestimate dangers of events pushed in their face all the time. It happens with plane crashes, terror attacks, earthquakes, floods as well as the coronavirus. And internet algorithms prioritising content you have already clicked on are amplifying this effect.

While it is a difficult task, professionals are highly responsible for the lack of critical thinking and increasing the effect of scaremongering by media. Nearly all activities of Parents International have been aiming for enabling professionals to support parents in their role better, but we may need to rethink. In the past months, the strongest promoters of child rights and common sense have been people with low levels of education and a very strong root in reality.

On this Safer Internet Day, we may need to rethink who is empowering whom and start appreciating all those parents who were able to prevent their children from harm as much as possible since the beginning of 2020. They were doing it in a virtual and physical environment taking its toll on them as well with jobs being lost, income becoming scarce, schools closing and requiring parents to teach their children, regular health care becoming unavailable and scaremongering impacting them as much as their children. We would like to take this opportunity to applaud them and to start exploring ways of mainstreaming their down-to-earth approach for protecting children’s mental health and well-being in one of the most difficult periods for parents and children all over world. At the same time, it is also high time to make mass online media and social network algorithms accountable for their actions.

[i]  https://www.kleinezeitung.at/international/corona/5928381/?fbclid=IwAR3xTr781BGne_OQA5BycFdbeB2O1m4cRrVqn0Y5v7SuKRr5uFjkCp6utUk

https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/new-findings-children-mental-health-covid-19

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32404219/

[ii] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/02/02/962060105/child-psychiatrists-warn-that-the-pandemic-may-be-driving-up-kids-suicide-risk?t=1612779690444

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7500342/

https://www.aappublications.org/news/2020/12/16/pediatricssuicidestudy121620

[iii] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12144-020-01191-4

https://www.bbc.com/news/education-53097289

[iv] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02973-3

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(20)30927-0/fulltext

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7311007/

https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/146/2/e2020004879

https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2020.25.21.2000903;?crawler=true

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/apa.15371

https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciaa1825/6024998

https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/contentassets/c1b78bffbfde4a7899eb0d8ffdb57b09/covid-19-school-aged-children.pdf

https://www.pasteur.fr/en/press-area/press-documents/covid-19-primary-schools-no-significant-transmission-among-children-students-teachers

[v] https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/publication/eur-scientific-and-technical-research-reports/lifecomp-european-framework-personal-social-and-learning-learn-key-competence

[vi] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11468377-thinking-fast-and-slow

[vii] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26530355-misbehaving