On March 19, 2026, the Erasmus+ LEAD-IN consortium partners came together once more to delve into how to engage the community to foster inclusive education and elevate school leadership. The online gathering, hosted by Teach For Belgium, explored why collaboration with parents is important, what strong school-parent partnerships can look like and how they can be strengthened in the context of any school.
“Building trust-based relationships between parents, teachers, and schools is essential for enhancing students’ well-being and educational outcomes,” Thomas Elchardus, support coordinator at Teach For Belgium, stated, opening his talk on parental involvement in front of an audience of more than thirty educators. According to him, talking with children, sharing meals, and discussing school progress significantly enhance students’ life satisfaction and academic performance.
It is no wonder, then, that parental engagement is placed in the category “most promising for raising attainment” when looking at effective yet less-costly strategies for elevating academic progress. That is due to the two-factor impact of parental involvement—increased general well-being for the students and the lowered barriers to communication between parents and school representatives.
“By investing in a partnership with parents, trust in education professionals increases among parents,” Elchardus said, underlining the ease in discussing and handling difficulties when the parent and teacher bodies collaborate.
To support its vision of parental involvement, the Teach for Belgium team based its vision of school-parent partnership on the model proposed by H. Lambrighs and A. Ryckmans in their book De betrokkenheidsboom. According to it, there are three stages in the relationship.
The first one is samen-leven (living together), which is centered around mutual appreciation and long-term ongoing communication to cultivate a sense of security and value in their collaborative efforts.
The second one, samen-denken (thinking together), relies on parents and teachers seeing each other as partners in the wellbeing of the children and exchanging knowledge and methodologies to increase the students’ attainment while decreasing the probability of conflict among the two sides.
The third one, samen-doen (doing together), builds on both, entailing active collaboration in nursing the children, with parents providing additional learning support and teachers extending their educational responsibilities. In doing so, challenge response becomes more effective.
These steps were emphasised by Belgian school leader Katrien Kovaleni, who underscored the importance of setting the right expectations for parents. She shared her vision, which sees them assisting with stimulating the learning process (through cultural activities, reading, helping with organising schoolwork at home) but not engaging in active teaching (which is the responsibility of the educator at school).
In order to build a foundation, which allows for this school-parent relationship building to blossom, Elchardus stressed the need for engaging in preventive positive actions to stimulate parent involvement. He listed three strategies: (1) self-organised parent-student open day or facilities tour; (2) giving students tasks, which require consultation with the parent (like drafting a family tree); and (3) beginning the year with discussions, during which parents share information regarding the student’s life outside of school (which allows teachers to get to know the environment in which the student is brought up).
To foster an easier adoption of these shared theoretical principles, the Teach for Belgium team had organised a number of small group discussions, during which participants could reflect together. These groups were either national or international. Each group would select a representative to share their discussion conclusions with the rest of the team. Additionally, the meeting chat was always open for questions, which the moderators would take time to answer.
With this wrapped, the next international meetup will be held on ground in Austria, where participants will focus on how to make education more inclusive for students of different language backgrounds.
