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.

More from Parents International

Parental Engagement at the Helsinki Education Week
Summary: This article explores the discussions from the Helsinki Education Week, focusing on the importance of parental engagement in education and how it complements the Whole School Approach.

Strengthening Parental Engagement: Research Insights on Parenting Support in Europe
Summary: An analytical piece presenting research findings on parenting support across Europe, underscoring the benefits of active parental involvement in children’s education.

ParENTrepreneurs Trainings in 3 Countries
Summary: This article details the ParENTrepreneurs training sessions conducted in Hungary, the Netherlands, and Spain, highlighting how these programs empower parents with entrepreneurial skills to support their children’s education.Parents International+5Parents International+5Parents International+5

Thriving Through Change
Summary: A reflective piece on the necessity of adapting education systems post-pandemic, emphasizing the role of parental engagement and the Whole School Approach in fostering resilience and inclusivity.

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: Insights into Migrant Children and Education

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.

More from Parents International

• Parental Engagement in Happy Schools
• Digital Technologies and Parental Empowerment
• Tackling Inequalities in Early Years
• Rethinking Equity in Early Childhood Education

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

International Day of Education – 24 January 2021

Nearly a year after government reactions to Covid-19 started triggering school closures in various parts of the world and more than a month after vaccination became available for those adults who wish to be vaccinated, the International Day of Education 2021 is the best opportunity to demand the immediate return of normal education provisions – we can only echo this year’s message by UNESCO on this. This should be the priority of good governance in all countries. By returning to normal we mean fully opening schools to their entire community of students, parents and teachers with no restrictive measures, but the past year has also shown that there is a need for immediate major changes in what is happening in them. The times of forced home schooling also have proven that parents must be part of decisions on what to change and how.

While measures may have been justified in the Spring of 2020, by now there is conclusive research evidence available showing that

• attending school does not put the vast majority of children at risk of getting seriously ill and they are not transmitting infection to their families and teachers[i];
• school closures have resulted in a devastating decline in well-being especially in countries that were not promoting children’s being together as much as possible[ii];
• mask mandates for children and rules on social distancing in school have a direct impact on both physical and mental health and thus making masks compulsory and orders that prevent hugging and similar physical contact cause direct harm to children[iii];
• education provisions online have a very low efficiency level for both young and older children (even for university students), and most countries failed to offer alternatives to help parents in their educating their children by promoting major deviations from school curricula and recognising some kind of family curricula[iv].

Thus, opening schools immediately should be an immediate step by any responsible government, but there are some pre-requisites that are of utmost importance:

1. In every country there is a low number of children who are vulnerable due to chronic or acute illness. Governments must offer teacher-guided online provisions for them. Given that this can be done in smaller groups and that playful methodologies that have proven to be effective for children forced to be away from school exist, these initiatives, mostly private ones, provided by NGOs need to be utilised immediately.
2. Teachers over 65 and with medically relevant chronic illnesses should be given priority in vaccination while vaccination must not be made compulsory or a pre-condition by education employers. All other school staff needs to be prioritised the same way as the general population as research shows they are not in more danger of infection at school than anybody else who regularly goes to work or shop.
3. Free testing must be made available on a voluntary basis for both children and school staff. However, testing of children must be avoided in case a child had not developed serious Covid-19 symptoms and mustn’t be a pre-condition of attending school or done as a regular activity.
4. It must be fully the parents’ consideration when they allow their children to attend school after an infection.
5. Schools must take it into account that a high percentage of children will return to school in a panic induced by media or the adults around them, and even more have suffered traumas that must be tackled by school professionals. Thus, trauma-informed methodologies, also mostly rolled out by NGOs must be made available to all schools.
6. There is a need to temporarily or permanently delete standardised, central tests from school programmes and to prioritise student well-being and mental health for at least the coming 2-3 years. Research clearly shows that the main victims of the previous year are children.
7. Structures and school leader empowerment schemes need to be put in place to ensure that decisions on school level are done with the active participation of parents partly to acknowledge the fantastic job of parents as educators, partly to ensure that experiences of the past few months are made part of current and future education provision.

In the coming months there is a need to continue the dialogue between schools and parents as well as governments and parents. The experiences and subsequent demands of parents towards school systems have not changed substantially since our research was done in the Spring and Summer of 2020. Parents today have a much deeper insight into formal education, the number of parents engaged, and the depth of their engagement has increased tremendously. Parents’ wishes towards formal education, the structure supporting them in educating their children have been clearly put together in #NewEducationDeal #ParentsFirst. Our call for action has won the support of a growing number of governments, many schools, professionals, researchers and tech companies. It has become part of larger initiatives on renewing education globally. Nearly all elements of the call for action can be made a reality rapidly if a government and/or a school decides to embrace them:

• School should be primarily acknowledged as a place for social learning,
• There is a need to highlight arts and sports alongside STEM, using methods that are suitable for children, with special focus on collaborative and playful methods,
• Centralised testing needs to be replaced by formative assessment methods,
• Schools must work closely together with families and they have an obligation to know families whose children they teach,
• There must be a clear division between the educational job of schools and families,
• Digital technologies need to become standard part of school to cater for individual learning needs, but they must only be a complement to learning in physical proximity, and
• There is a need to rethink curricula to agree on what is really basic knowledge, skills and competences.

We in Parents International believe that the most important positive outcome of the crisis created by governments’ measures related to Covid-19 can be a rapid renewal of education making it suitable for the 21^st century. We need to act fast and change provisions substantially. The frightful lack of critical thinking when facing scaremongering in mass media and the willingness to give up the most basic human rights without major resistance in the world’s population are symptoms showing that school did not prepare most people for becoming conscious 21^st century citizens and there is little sign that schools as they are now will do a better job. Acting along the lines of the #NewEducationDeal may lead to more active citizenship, too, although parents and teachers as part of the general population has not done a great job so far in this field. But we can only do it together. Education for the future depends on #ParentsFirst parental engagement in moulding a #NewEducationDeal in all countries.

Eszter Salamon
Director

[i] For example: 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

[ii] For example https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-124394/v1
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186/s13034-020-00329-3.pdf
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abstract/2764730
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Anant_Kumar/publication/340954951_COVID_19_and_its_mental_health_consequences/links/5ea7ccd492851c1a9076636e/COVID-19-and-its-mental-health-consequences.pdf

[iii] For example https://www.tmc.edu/news/2020/05/touch-starvation/
https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2020-39582-001.html
https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3021/rr-6

[iv] For example http://www.bildungsmanagement.net/Schulbarometer/en/
https://www.nwea.org/content/uploads/2020/05/Collaborative-Brief_Covid19-Slide-APR20.pdf
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00787-020-01706-1
https://www.unicef.org/eca/reports/preventing-lockdown-generation-europe-and-central-asia
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.592670/full
https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/12/1079462
https://journal.iaimnumetrolampung.ac.id/index.php/ji/article/view/914

Our message for World Children Day 2020

We observe World Children Day on 20 November since 1989, the birth of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. In 2020 we have little to celebrate, but observing the day means we need to raise our voice and help raise all parents to do the same for the rights of our children. UNICEF had highlighted that this year, COVID-19-related regulations and restrictions have resulted in a child rights crisis. They call your attention to the fact that the costs of the pandemic for children are immediate and, if unaddressed, may last a lifetime. Their call for action states it is time for generations to come together to reimagine the type of world we want to create. Parents International has advocated for this when we say #ParentsFirst: to empower the primary caregivers, the parents and guardians who are the protagonists of ensuring and protecting child rights. The current child rights crisis is as much a result of a dramatic change for the worse in the lives of parents as that of governments stopping service provisions. This is what needs to change and now. Today’s children and youth, be them young children or even university students, are losing the only chance in many ways if these trends are not stopped and reversed.

UNICEF published the Six-Point Plan to Protect our Children calling governments to take action in various fields. The first of these is “to ensure all children learn, including by closing the digital divide”. The first part doesn’t need any action, all children do learn, the real question is what, when and how. In a recent conference about the Sustainable Development Goals, it has been acknowledged that SDG4 on quality, inclusive education is the overarching SDG. Lifelong learning of both children and adults, especially that of parents is the key to achieving all other action points on the UNCEF agenda.

Universal access to health care and nutrition as well as informed, free choice of vaccination is on the one hand a basic obligation of the state, but on the other hand the most fundamental job of any parent. While access to clean water and sanitation is again mainly a government’s obligation, parents educated in this field play a crucial role in hygiene regardless financial or physical circumstances.  Abuse, violence and neglect are also best prevented by empowering and educating parents, but it needs to be kept in mind that the overwhelming majority of parents actually protect their children from such traumatic experiences. This is an element that child rights activists tend to forget about. We can only applaud the wish to redouble efforts to protect and support families and children within them living through conflict, disaster and displacement. In the current dystopic world nearly all families are living through conflict and disaster – of different proportions depending on the country they live in and their personal situation. The detrimental effect of government regulations on interpersonal contacts must be stopped and – if it is still possible – reversed.

Last but not least, we can only repeat what we have already said several times: child poverty and inclusive recovery is only possible if the primary target of any action is the family raising the child. Programmes directed at the child and only them are deemed to fail the test of sustainability.

Organisations and experts gathered in Parents International are grateful for the support of some governments in making our #ParentsFirst and #NewEducationDeal initiatives a reality, and we can only hope putting parents in the focus of child and child rights protection will become as universal as the observation of 20 November.