In out-of-school care centres in Flanders, building warm and trusting relationships with parents is both an important aim and a huge frustration. Practitioners often struggle with their role towards parents and feel insufficiently trained to deal with increasing expectations about cooperation with parents. In this article we describe the results…

Previous research shows that the lockdown of schools due to the COVID-19 pandemic increased the already existing inequalities in education but little is known about the processes underlying these outcomes. In this study we used Bourdieu's theories to explore how interactions between teachers' expectations of parents and parents' availability of…

Educational transitions are crucial sites of social selection. Whereas social bias in teacher recommendations is well-established, less is known about teacher guidance in the process preceding the actual choice. Bridging the literature on social class and educational choice and home-school relations this study explores classed patterns in the…

This study investigates Spolsky's conception of language policy as the amalgam of language beliefs, language practices and language management. To the best of our knowledge, no quantitative evidence has ever been produced for his theoretical model. The current paper addressed this void, albeit specifically in the domain of Early Childhood Care and…

Positive transitions across home, ECEC and compulsory school education (CSE) are critical in promoting children's development and educational achievement: this seems especially the case for children from migrant backgrounds. However, as a consequence of entrenched institutional practices and lack of ownership the issues by the different groups of…

In 2020, 1.5 billion students in 188 countries/economies were locked out of their schools. Students everywhere have been faced with schools that are open one day and closed the next, causing massive disruption to their learning. With the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic still raging, many education systems are still struggling, and the situation is…

This study reports on the design of a video-based instrument to assess student teachers' parent-teacher communication competences (PTCC) in a reliable and valid way. PTCC refer to the competences needed to communicate successfully with parents during conversations such as parent-teacher conferences. Taking into account both conceptual and…

The advantage of pedagogical documentation has been widely documented in the field of early childhood education and care (ECEC). However, little research points out how and why professionals are using pedagogical documentation from the staff's perspective itself. Therefore, this research aimed to examine how pedagogical documentation is employed…

Family-School Partnerships (FSP) are important for students' academic achievements and social-emotional development. Therefore, pre-service teachers need to learn how to establish this. However, in teacher education programmes this topic is insufficiently addressed partially attributed to already overloaded programmes. This study reports on a…

The aim of this international study was to generate recommendations for curriculum improvement in family-school partnerships (FSP) by examining teacher candidates' understandings, attitudes and experiences. A survey of 1144 candidates in their first or final year of preparation at three universities, one each in Belgium, the Netherlands and the…

Beyond learning how to manage children in a classroom, new teachers also must learn how to manage relationships with the adults in their school. Every new employee must be socialized into membership of their new work organization. In the case of teachers, that's the school and the district. In a study of beginning teachers in Flanders, the…

Family-school partnerships (FSP) are considered important for students' academic and social development. However, preparing preservice teachers for these partnerships is seen as a challenge. Most studies on preservice teachers' preparation for FSP have been conducted in North American contexts, and little knowledge exists from a European…

This study relates trust at the level of both the teacher and the faculty to teachers' job satisfaction. Teaching experience is explored as a moderator of the trust-satisfaction relationship. Multilevel analyses on data of 2091 teachers across 80 secondary schools in Flanders (Belgium) revealed positive associations between teacher trust in…

The data in this paper represent the experiences and perspectives of parents and teachers who worked as communities of practice, designing support plans for the inclusion of three students with intellectual disabilities in general education classrooms. Their reflections, obtained through interviews and questionnaires, show how they constructed…

The focus of this study was a parent-teacher collaborative teaming model in which knowledge and practice of designing and implementing supports was based on a dynamic and creative interaction of people committed to the inclusion of a child with disabilities in a general education setting. The effectiveness of the teaming model on the academic and…