Imagine a parent receiving a message from school near the end of the working day. Their child has disrupted the lesson and struggled to get started on an assignment. Not for the first time. The teacher asks to talk, and the parent feels their shoulders sink. One more thing to deal with.

On the other side is a teacher, also tired, who has tried to help the child and needs support. Both want the best for the child. Yet a request to work together can sound like an accusation when energy has run out.

This is something we need to discuss when we discuss PISA. We need to take teaching methods seriously, yes, but the conditions around teaching must also support the demands it places on children and adults. Perhaps this is precisely what we have not examined closely enough so far.

In my work with children, I ask: Are we working together? Is it clear who does what? Or are we so tired that each of us is primarily trying to make it through the day, with little energy to spare?

When one adult says “yes” to a child, another says “no,” and a third says “maybe,” the day becomes harder for everyone. The child faces shifting expectations, and the adults have to keep negotiating the same things. Exhaustion can increase inconsistency, and inconsistency can increase exhaustion. Then we look at the child and ask what is wrong with them.

An Irish longitudinal study found reciprocal links between parenting stress and children’s behavioral and emotional difficulties from the ages of five to nine. [1] The strain on parents and the difficulties children face can therefore feed each other. We need to help people break out of that pattern with the same seriousness we bring to children’s learning difficulties.

I also think we need to discuss our responsibility to work together as seriously as we discuss our right to services. In my work, I regularly hear “the school should deal with this” or “the family should deal with that.”

Meanwhile, the child waits.

Responsibility does not disappear when we push it away. It falls to someone else or goes unmet. An exhausted parent needs support to be able to parent. A teacher who can barely teach because of conflict needs help inside the classroom. School leaders and public authorities must make it possible for people to fulfill the responsibilities entrusted to them.

We also need to dare to ask what should take up less space in school than it does today. When we add material and assignments without reducing other demands, we take time away from what is already there. If we want children to gain a stronger command of reading and other foundations, we must give them enough time to do so. We cannot make everything a priority. Something has to give so that something else can thrive.

Working together must itself become a manageable task for both parents and schools. It needs to be clear who helps the child in which circumstances, and where to turn if that help is not enough. Otherwise, meetings held in the child’s interests stop producing solutions and become yet another burden on the people attending them.

In a meta-analysis of 77 studies, structured interventions that brought families and schools into closer coordination produced, on average, improvements in both children’s academic performance and their social and emotional functioning. [2] These studies do not explain the causes of Iceland’s PISA trends, but they show that giving more support to the people who support children can make a meaningful difference. Helping them is helping the child.

We must not let the PISA debate become one more task added to the list without changing children’s circumstances.

It is our responsibility as adults to create conditions in which children can learn. It is not children’s responsibility to get us working together.

I would like to thank A. for deep conversations, critical review, and an important contribution to the development of this article.

The author is a behavior analyst, psychologist, and teacher.

References

[1] Van Dijk, W., de Moor, M. H. M., Oosterman, M., Huizink, A. C., and Matvienko-Sikar, K. (2022). Longitudinal relations between parenting stress and child internalizing and externalizing behaviors: Testing within-person changes, bidirectionality and mediating mechanisms. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 16, 942363. doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2022.942363.

[2] Smith, T. E., Sheridan, S. M., Kim, E. M., Park, S., and Beretvas, S. N. (2020). The effects of family-school partnership interventions on academic and social-emotional functioning: A meta-analysis exploring what works for whom. Educational Psychology Review, 32, 511–544. doi: 10.1007/s10648-019-09509-w.