Who really educates a child? The answer seems obvious: the school, the teachers, perhaps the curriculum. Yet a single school day is enough to show that learning depends on a much broader network of relationships. Families who help with homework, care for, listen to, and support children. Communities that provide resources, opportunities, and encouragement. Teachers who try to connect this entire ecosystem within the classroom. The challenge is how to turn this collection of efforts into genuine collaboration.
That is the question at the heart of Six Global Lessons on How Family, School, and Community Engagement Can Transform Education, a report published by the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution. Over a period of more than two years, researchers, civil society organizations, teachers, students, and families worked together on a study conducted in 16 countries across six continents. The research gathered the perspectives of 9,473 families, 2,726 educators, and 9,963 students from 235 schools through surveys, community conversations, and participatory analysis processes.
The goal of the study is to understand how relationships between families, schools, and communities are built, what obstacles hinder collaboration, and what conditions help strengthen it. In this article, we review the six lessons proposed by the research. Together, they offer a perspective on an aspect of education that often receives less attention than curriculum, technology, or assessment: the quality of the relationships among those involved in the learning of children and young people.
Let’s Talk About Beliefs
Before trying to transform a school, it is worth understanding the beliefs that different stakeholders hold about learning, teaching, and the very purpose of education. Because they do not always agree.
This is the first lesson from the Brookings study. Through surveys and conversations conducted in 16 countries, the authors found significant differences in how different groups understand the purpose of education, what they consider high-quality teaching, and what they expect students to learn during their time in school. These differences are not always visible, but they profoundly shape the relationship between families and schools.
According to the authors, any effort to strengthen collaboration between schools and communities should begin by making these beliefs explicit. The goal is not to achieve complete unanimity, but to better understand the expectations, values, and experiences that each group brings to the educational conversation. When these perspectives remain implicit, misunderstandings, frustrations, and conflicting expectations are more likely to emerge. When they are openly discussed, it becomes easier to build shared goals.
The report refers to this process as coherence: the ability of an educational community to develop a common language and a shared vision of the purpose of education. Such coherence does not emerge automatically. It requires spaces for dialogue in which families, students, and teachers can express their perspectives and listen to one another.
The research suggests that educational systems often attempt to transform structures without paying sufficient attention to the beliefs that sustain them. Yet the communities involved in the study showed that understanding these beliefs can be the first step toward building stronger relationships and guiding meaningful change. Before deciding how to improve education, it may be necessary to answer a more basic question: what do its participants understand by a good education?
The research gathered the perspectives of 9,473 families, 2,726 educators, and 9,963 students from 235 schools through surveys, community conversations, and participatory analysis processes.
Families Are Already Involved, Even If Schools Do Not Always See It
The second lesson challenges one of the most widespread assumptions in education: that families are not sufficiently involved in their children’s education. According to the study, families report being actively engaged in learning, but many forms of participation go unnoticed by schools.
Throughout the research, the vast majority of families described multiple ways of supporting learning outside school. They help with homework, supervise study habits, discuss what children have learned, encourage productive routines, support academic decisions, and seek resources when difficulties arise. Yet these contributions rarely occupy a central place in how schools assess family engagement. Teachers, by contrast, often associate participation with activities that take place within the school: attending meetings, participating in events, serving on committees, or responding to school requests.
From this perspective, physical absence may be interpreted as a lack of interest. The problem is that many families are deeply involved in their children’s education without expressing that involvement in ways that are visible to the institution. This difference in perception appeared consistently across the countries studied and helps explain some of the misunderstandings that arise between families and teachers.
When schools rely on an overly narrow definition of participation, they risk overlooking efforts that are fundamental to student learning. For this reason, the report proposes a shift in perspective. Rather than viewing families as occasional collaborators or recipients of information, it suggests recognizing them as educational partners. This means understanding how they support learning beyond the classroom, valuing those contributions, and creating forms of collaboration that do not depend exclusively on physical presence at school.
Barriers Also Have a Context
When schools try to explain why some families participate less than others, the answers often focus on a lack of interest, commitment, or involvement. The third lesson invites us to view the issue differently. The barriers that hinder collaboration between families and schools rarely stem from a single cause and, in many cases, have more to do with families’ living conditions than with their willingness to participate.
Through surveys and conversations across countries, families, teachers, and students agreed that important obstacles exist. What is interesting is that, although they recognize these barriers, they do not always interpret them in the same way. While some teachers tend to attribute low participation to individual family choices, families describe a much more complex reality. Economic difficulties, incompatible work schedules, long commutes, caregiving responsibilities, language barriers, and a lack of positive previous experiences with schools appeared repeatedly in the testimonies collected by the study.
In some contexts, additional factors included parents’ educational backgrounds and the perception that they lack the knowledge needed to support their children’s learning. The report argues that these barriers cannot be addressed simply by expecting families to adapt to existing school structures. Instead, they require solutions designed collaboratively. Listening to families, understanding the conditions in which they live, and creating strategies that respond to those realities are essential for expanding opportunities for participation.
Trust Moves Slowly
Conversations about education often focus on resources, methodologies, or learning outcomes. The fourth lesson shifts attention to something far less tangible: trust. More precisely, it highlights the relationships of trust that allow families, teachers, and students to work together when challenges, disagreements, or shared difficulties arise.
The study found a striking result. In general, teachers reported lower levels of trust in families than families reported in teachers. This pattern appeared repeatedly across contexts and suggests that perceptions of the relationship are not always reciprocal. While many families expressed confidence in educators’ work, teachers tended to be more cautious about the degree of support and commitment they perceived from families.
For the authors, this finding matters because trust is not merely the outcome of a good relationship. It is also a condition for developing one. When trust exists, it becomes easier to share information, address conflicts, acknowledge mistakes, and work together on behalf of students. When trust is absent, even well-designed initiatives struggle to succeed. The report uses a particularly revealing expression: building at the speed of trust.
The idea is that strong relationships cannot be imposed through regulations or created instantly. They are built through repeated interactions, mutual listening, respect, and shared experiences over time. For this reason, the communities involved in the study emphasized the importance of creating regular opportunities for dialogue and interaction. Trust does not appear at the end of the process as a reward. It is part of the process itself. And, like any meaningful relationship, it requires time, consistency, and a willingness to understand the perspective of others.
Collaboration Cannot Depend on Goodwill Alone
The fifth lesson shifts attention from individual relationships to the structures that support them. Throughout the research, many of the most successful examples of collaboration among families, schools, and communities shared a common characteristic: they did not depend solely on the initiative of a committed principal, a particularly active group of parents, or an exceptionally motivated teacher.
Family and community engagement cannot be viewed as an optional or supplementary activity. If it is recognized as important for student learning and well-being, then it must have a stable place within educational policies, budgets, and institutional priorities. The authors observe that, in many countries, family engagement still occupies a peripheral role. It is encouraged in rhetoric but rarely supported by dedicated funding, protected teacher time, or permanent coordination structures. As a result, initiatives are often inconsistent and overly dependent on individual commitment.
The research suggests that building lasting partnerships requires more than good intentions. It requires resources, planning, and clearly defined responsibilities. Just as educational systems invest in curriculum, teacher training, and assessment, they also need to invest in the mechanisms that strengthen relationships among schools, families, and communities.
This lesson is particularly significant because it challenges a common tendency: treating collaboration as an additional task to be pursued when time permits. The report argues the opposite. If relationships among families, schools, and communities matter for learning, then they must become part of the ordinary functioning of the system rather than remaining confined to isolated initiatives or voluntary efforts.
Researching With Communities, Not About Them
The sixth and final lesson is also one of the most original. The report not only examines how to strengthen relationships among families, schools, and communities. It also proposes a different way of producing knowledge about them.
Traditionally, educational research places families, teachers, and students in the role of participants who answer surveys, interviews, or focus groups. Once the information is collected, researchers analyze the results and formulate recommendations. In this study, the process was different. Communities participated not only by providing data but also by interpreting it, discussing it, and using it to identify possible improvement strategies.
The methodology developed by Brookings is built around this idea. Surveys are not the final objective of the research but rather the starting point for conversations among families, teachers, and students. Through these dialogues, participants can compare perspectives, identify shared challenges, and explore solutions grounded in their own realities.
According to the authors, this approach offers an additional advantage. It helps challenge the power dynamics that often exist within educational systems. Decisions are frequently made far from the communities directly affected by them. When families, students, and teachers actively participate in producing and interpreting evidence, their ability to influence priorities and decisions increases.
The research shows that this process not only generates useful information. It also strengthens trust, improves mutual understanding, and supports the development of shared goals. In other words, research ceases to be an activity external to the educational community and becomes a tool for dialogue and collective learning.
It is no coincidence that this is the final lesson. After understanding stakeholders’ beliefs, recognizing families as partners, identifying barriers, building trust, and institutionalizing collaboration, the report proposes one further step: involving communities in the very production of the knowledge that guides educational change.
