This article explores an international primary school which intentionally engages parents coming from countries with different systems of education in a relationship based on partnership in order to stimulate the personal development of children. The case study gives a voice to teachers who reflect on the approach of the school and to parents who had no previous experience of this approach, either as pupils or adults. Hence the research question: how do these parents construe their understanding of the openness of the school? Based on the interpretative phenomenological analysis of the parental accounts, the study shows that when parents start to recognise the traits of an unknown educational paradigm where the opening of the school towards the partnership with the parents represents just one means of stimulating the holistic development of individual children they recognise it not as a neutral phenomenon, but one which is good for their children, especially against the backdrop of their experiences with schools that remain closed.