The sense of belonging is a human need that educational systems must foster to achieve student success. In the school setting, this feeling strengthens the bond between members of the institution and motivates families to become more involved with the school, improving the overall school climate. Teachers play a crucial role in promoting this sense of belonging by influencing the connection between families and the educational community. This study aims to understand how teachers from different contexts, one Colombian and the other Spanish, promote families' sense of belonging to the school. To this end, an evaluative, comparative, quantitative, and non-experimental study was conducted using a validated questionnaire applied to a significant sample in both contexts. The results show that, for teachers in both contexts, it is very important for families to feel satisfied with the education their children receive, which is why they strive to build trust in the teaching staff. The sense of belonging is more strongly promoted by teachers in charter schools and those with more years of experience in schools in the Spanish context. In the Colombian context, women are the ones who most actively promote it, thereby perpetuating gender roles. There is a need to provide specific training for teachers to help them develop this capacity in families, as well as to conduct further research to explore the differences that may influence the promotion of a sense of belonging.

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly changed the global educational landscape, prompting a need to explore emerging literature on home learning, literacy development, and parental involvement. This study aims to contribute to Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 4: Quality Education, and SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities, by examining these aspects in the context of the pandemic and beyond through a bibliometric analysis. The analysis depicts 416 publications from the Web of Science Database between 2014–2023. The study utilized co-citation and co-word analysis techniques to identify key research clusters and trends related to home learning and literacy development. The analysis revealed that parental involvement can help mitigate learning loss, supporting SDG targets for equitable and inclusive education. Key research clusters identified include the influence of socio-economic status on literacy outcomes, continuity of literacy practices, and the long-term effects of traditional versus digital home learning environments. The findings highlighted a consensus on the importance of a supportive home literacy environment for reading skills and overall academic success. The need for intervention programs targeting low-income groups to ensure equitable access to learning resources, aligning with SDG 10, was also identified through the study. The findings have practical implications for enhancing the home literacy environment, increasing parental involvement, and supporting early literacy interventions, providing valuable insights for education stakeholders, policymakers, and researchers in the post-pandemic era.

Sexuality remains a sensitive topic in many Asian societies. Despite the growing recognition of the importance of sexuality education, it remains a controversial issue in certain Asian contexts. Parents play an important role in addressing their children's sexual curiosity and fostering healthy attitudes and values regarding sexuality. This scoping review analysed 17 articles published in 2014-2024 in the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus databases, aiming to explore parental knowledge of childhood sexuality education and the associated factors that might influence their understanding. Findings reveal that parents' knowledge is only moderate on average, with significant gaps in understanding and communication skills. Key results indicate that cultural, demographic, and socio-economic factors affect parents’ knowledge, with variations across different topics. Research also highlights the significant role of intervention programs in advancing their understanding. This review of the literature over the past decade builds powerful support for sexuality education of children in the Asian context and also emphasizes the value of cultural sensitivities in promoting the development of sexuality education worldwide. Ultimately, this study contributes to the global discourse on improving sexuality education by offering valuable information for policymakers, educators, and practitioners working to design effective sexuality education programs.

This study used data from the COVID Social Mobility and Opportunities (COSMO) Study, to examine young people’s university aspirations and post-18 education expectations during COVID-19 in relation to their demographic and socio-economic position, school engagement, education disruption, and attitudes to education. Through a series of binary regression analyses, the findings showed the important role school engagement (in the form of online lesson attendance, schoolwork and teacher contact) played in young people’s university aspirations and post-18 education plans, especially at the height of the pandemic. Education disruption and locus of control were found to contribute to young people’s aspirations and post-18 expectations. The findings also highlighted the influence of gender, ethnicity and socioeconomic position regarding university aspirations and expectations, laying bare the obstacles in accessing learning faced by disadvantaged young people at a crucial time in their education. The findings contribute to continued debates about educational aspirations in the post COVID-19 world and have policy implications especially as this generation of young people are still in education. They may also contribute to discussions on ways of supporting this COVID-19 generation through fiscal changes and widening participation policies that extend to post-18 education and early career development.

Our study examines the link between adolescents’ skills (mathematics, reading literacy, and physical fitness) and the frequency with which they participate in housework. We utilize a large longitudinal dataset of Hungarian adolescents (N = 37,461), making this, to our knowledge, the first European study on this topic. We use a rich set of background variables and fixed effects estimators to account for time-varying and time-invariant individual characteristics. Contrary to most of the literature we find cognitive skills to have no practically significant relationship with housework frequency. This discrepancy can be attributed to methodological choices (i.e., the use of the fixed effects estimator) or sociocultural differences in housework duties between the regions studied. Investigating heterogeneous effects on cognitive skills, we find girls’ literacy scores to be slightly affected by daily housework (-.02 SD), unlike boys’. The difference is more pronounced for children with highly educated parents and working mothers (-.06 SD). Substantially lower mathematics scores are detected for children who almost never participate in housework and have unemployed mothers (-.19 SD). Children who have chores to do almost every day and whose mothers are on parental leave also show signs of worsened mathematics ability (-.1 SD). Fitness levels of students who rarely engage in housework are significantly lower (-.04 SD), suggesting that some participation in household tasks contributes to physical well-being. This effect is pronounced for children of tertiary-educated parents (-.05 SD). Overall, findings suggest that household chores are cognitively neutral for most adolescents, have small physical-fitness benefits when performed in moderation, and become academically detrimental only at the extremes within specific family contexts.