Kazi Nasrin Siddiqa

Global evidence, and Bangladesh’s own history, shows that reform cannot be designed in ministries and handed down. It must be built with the people for whom education exists.
For generations, Bangladesh has understood something that contemporary education policy sometimes forgets: a school does not begin with a government building, a curriculum, or a policy document. It begins with a community deciding that its children deserve a place to learn. Many schools that now form the backbone of the national system were founded this way, on land donated by individuals, or collectively by villagers, long before the state absorbed them into the formal system. That instinct has not disappeared. A community-school initiative in Rangpur has, in recent years, seen local people donate land for nine schools serving children in remote areas.
This history is more than a nostalgic footnote. It anticipates, by more than a century, what a substantial new body of international research is now confirming with data: education systems become stronger, fairer and more resilient when families and communities are treated not as beneficiaries of a public service but as partners in building it. That is the central argument of the Family, School and Community Engagement (FSCE) initiative at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education (CUE), and it deserves closer scrutiny, not uncritical import, in Bangladesh’s own policy discourse.
From “parent involvement” to systems transformation
Family engagement is too often reduced to a parent attending a meeting, paying a fee, or holding a seat on a school management committee (SMC). These activities have value, but CUE’s FSCE initiative, launched in 2018 and now anchored by a Global Family Engagement in Education Network (FEEN) of more than sixty civil-society organizations, governments and researchers across six continents, argues they are not sufficient on their own. Its working distinction is between involvement, in which families are asked to support decisions already made elsewhere, and engagement, in which they help shape those decisions from the outset.
The evidentiary centerpiece is Six Global Lessons on How Family, School, and Community Engagement Can Transform Education (Morris & Nóra, Brookings, June 2024), a two-year, sixteen-country study using a participatory methodology called the Conversation Starter Tools: structured surveys paired with facilitated community dialogue, rather than top-down data extraction. Researchers gathered views from 9,473 families, 2,726 educators and 9,963 students across 235 schools in Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, Ghana, Hungary, India, Kazakhstan, Kenya, the Netherlands, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania (Zanzibar), Uganda, England and the United States. Six lessons recurred across these otherwise very different systems: begin with beliefs; position families as partners; collectively dismantle barriers; build engagement at the speed of trust; treat FSCE as core practice rather than an optional add-on; and use community-driven research to redistribute, not just describe, power. The consistent thread is that people support reform when they have had a genuine hand in shaping it, a finding that is intuitive but rarely built into how education bureaucracies actually operate.
What Bangladesh’s own data shows, and what it leaves out
Bangladesh was one of the sixteen countries in this study, not a bystander to it. Between 2023 and 2026, the civil-society organization Education & Cultural Society (ECS) led fieldwork across rural and urban secondary schools, engaging families, educators and students, alongside a review of national policy. The finding that should worry policymakers is not that families are indifferent (the research found the opposite, that families care deeply) but that the barriers keeping adolescents out of school cannot be resolved inside the school gate. The cost of schooling, pressure on young people to start earning, migration, and family circumstance all featured. So did early marriage, a barrier that falls disproportionately on girls and interacts directly with Bangladesh’s own well-documented struggle to keep adolescent girls in secondary school once economic or social pressure intensifies at home. A family-engagement model that treats “family” as gender-neutral risks missing this: in many of the households the research describes, it is a mother’s negotiating position within the family, not a school’s outreach effort, that determines whether a daughter continues past class eight. Any FSCE strategy for Bangladesh has to be built with that reality in view, not layered on top of it.
It is also worth being candid about what a fourteen-school study can and cannot tell us. It offers rich qualitative insight into how families, teachers and students in those specific communities experience school. It is not a nationally representative sample, and its recommendations should be read as a starting hypothesis for policy, tested further, rather than a finished blueprint.
The evidence on trust, and its limits
The most measurable claim in this literature concerns relational trust. CUE’s Global Rubrics, developed with education systems in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Colombia and the United States, and since piloted in contexts including Bangladesh, set out four practical pillars: an inclusive culture, trusting relationships, treating families as assets rather than problems, and dedicating real resources to engagement rather than running it as a project. Brookings’ own materials cite research finding that schools with strong relational trust among families, teachers and administrators were roughly ten times more likely to show improved learning outcomes. That figure originates in Anthony Bryk and Barbara Schneider’s study of Chicago public schools in the 1990s, rigorous work, but drawn from one urban American school district under a specific set of reforms. It is suggestive, not proof that the same multiplier holds in a Bangladeshi upazila. The safer claim, and the one the broader sixteen-country evidence actually supports, is directional: trust between families and schools correlates with better outcomes across very different systems, even if the exact size of that effect will vary by context.
The warning from Zanzibar, and Bangladesh’s own institutional constraints
Brookings’ Zanzibar research offers a caution Bangladesh should take seriously. There, family engagement was found to have narrowed into formal SMC representation rather than a system-wide practice, and FSCE initiatives tended to be donor-funded projects that faded once the funding cycle ended. Bangladesh’s SMCs and PTAs already exist on paper in most secondary schools; the honest question is whether they function as genuine deliberative bodies or as compliance formalities convened before an inspection. Layered onto this is a set of constraints the global FSCE literature, built mostly outside South Asia, does not fully address: a teacher workforce already stretched thin, a national curriculum (NCTB) with limited local flexibility, and a madrasa sector that runs on different governance lines from mainstream secondary schools and would need its own approach to family engagement rather than a single national template.
None of this is an argument against the model. It is an argument for adapting it deliberately rather than adopting it wholesale. Concretely: teacher training colleges should build family-partnership skills into pre-service training, not treat it as an in-service afterthought; the Directorate of Primary Education and Secondary and Higher Education Division should pilot the Global Rubrics’ engagement framework in a defined set of upazilas with independent evaluation, rather than a national rollout; and school inspection and accountability frameworks should begin recording the functioning of SMCs and PTAs, not merely their existence.
From donated land to shared ownership
One distinction is worth preserving carefully. The state, not the community, bears the constitutional responsibility to guarantee the right to education; families should not have to donate land, money or labour simply to access a basic public service. But there is a real difference between communities financing the state’s obligations and communities participating in the public purpose of education. The first can entrench inequality between rich and poor communities. The second, done well, can build the kind of accountability and shared ownership that a distant curriculum document cannot.
In the past, a family in a Bangladeshi village might donate a plot of land so a school could exist where none had before. What the education system needs today is not more donated land, but a structural way of recognizing what families already contribute: their knowledge of their own children, their time, and, where it is earned, their trust. The more useful question for Bangladeshi policymakers is no longer “how do we get parents to attend meetings?” It is “how do we build institutions (SMCs, teacher training, inspection systems) that treat families and communities as genuine co-authors of education, without pretending the barriers families face are only educational ones?”
A school does not merely stand in a community. It is part of the community’s own fabric. Unless policy is built to reflect that, deliberately, and with an honest account of where the evidence is strong and where it is still provisional, education in Bangladesh will continue to change without truly transforming.

Sources: Morris, E.M. & Nóra, L. (2024), Six Global Lessons on How Family, School, and Community Engagement Can Transform Education*, Brookings Institution; Brookings/Education & Cultural Society policy brief on family engagement in Bangladesh secondary education (2023–24); Brookings, “Making Family, School, and Community Engagement Integral to Zanzibar’s Learning Ecosystem”; CUE Global Rubrics (2024); Bryk, A.S. & Schneider, B. (2002),* Trust in Schools: A Core Resource for Improvement*, Russell Sage Foundation.*
The writer is an Echidna Global Scholar of the Brookings Institution, USA, a former Consultant of The World Bank and Executive Director of ECS – Education & Cultural Society (NGO).