The support needs of primary and lower secondary school students have increased with inclusion (Edwards & Downes, 2013), and one flexible way to support students’ varied needs for learning and well-being is interprofessional collaboration (Malinen et al., 2013). Effective collaboration between education, social and healthcare sectors has been found to have a positive impact on individual well-being, professional satisfaction and organizational productivity (Petri, 2010). Multiple studies state that communication or interaction is a crucial factor for effective collaboration between professionals (e.g. Griffiths et al., 2021; Jahans-Baynton & Grealish, 2022; Petri, 2010), but only a few studies are explicitly focusing on the role of communication or interaction. Moreover, the majority of the previous studies have focused on interprofessional collaboration among healthcare professionals (Wei et al., 2022) or between social and healthcare (Kallio et al., 2022), and only a few studies have focused on interprofessional collaboration with teachers and schools. In this systematic literature review, we aim to explore the role of interaction in primary and lower secondary schools’ interprofessional collaboration. The research question is: What meanings for interaction can be found in previous studies concerning professional collaboration between teachers and social and healthcare professionals?

We view our study through the lens of ecological systems theory (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) and social capital theory (Coleman, 1988; Putnam, 1994). In ecological systems theory, the child develops in the interplay with the surrounding environmental systems, which are interconnected. The microsystem includes the child’s primary relationships, for example in family, school or hobbies, impacting directly to their lives. The mesosystem involves all the interactions between the microsystems, and these interactions can have significant effects on the child’s development. The exosystem, macrosystem and chronosystem impact also the child’s life through indirect environments, different societal structures and historical time. (Bronfenbrenner, 1979.) To ensure a child’s well-being, support from multiple systems is needed (Hesjedal et al., 2016), and interaction and communication play an important role in effective collaboration between the individuals at the different systems (Jahans-Baynton & Grealish, 2022). In this study, we focus on interactions within the mesosystem. The microsystem has the most direct impact on a child’s life, so it is important to explore, how functional interactions between these microsystems can enhance support for the child’s well-being and learning. The relationships at the mesosystem can be seen as social capital for the collaborating individuals to work more effectively for the child, but also as a common good that enhances a trusting climate in the community (Coleman, 1988; Putnam, 1994). Thus, good interaction skills increase the social capital of professionals, which in turn enables them to identify and support children's needs in an appropriate way in their growing environment.

This review broadens our understanding of effective interprofessional collaboration between teachers and social and healthcare professionals, especially from the perspective of interaction. Schools are important in detecting and supporting a child’s well-being, but teachers may often consider communication one-sided (Ekornes, 2015). The results can be applied to develop collaboration between professionals in child and family services and in teacher education.

The guidelines of the PRISMA 2020 statement were followed for conducting and reporting this review (Page et al., 2021). The literature search was conducted in nine databases, covering broadly the fields of education, social care and healthcare: ERIC, Education Source Ultimate, Education Database, PsycINFO, CINAHL, SocINDEX, PubMed, Scopus and Web of Science. The search yielded 6607 articles, and after removing duplicates, the total number of screened articles was 3146. The first screening was based on titles and abstracts, and it was conducted by the first author in Rayyan. In the second phase, all the full texts were screened by at least two authors, according to jointly defined inclusion and exclusion criteria. The inclusion criteria included only empirical and peer-reviewed research articles published from 2005 onwards, concerning compulsory school teachers’ adult collaboration with at least one professional from social or healthcare sectors, and describing the role of interaction as part of collaboration. Any discrepancies were discussed and resolved collaboratively with the author team. After the full-text screening, the references of selected articles were also checked manually for relevant undiscovered articles. All the selected articles were assessed with the Mixed Methods Appraisal tool (MMAT) (Hong et al., 2018) independently by two authors to minimize the bias. The data was analyzed thematically to arrange the wide range of findings in a systematic way.

The review reveals the lack of studies concerning the meanings of interaction in collaboration between education and social and healthcare. According to the preliminary results, many of the existing research articles recognize the importance of interaction and communication for successful collaboration, but the concepts of collaboration, interaction or communication are used overlapping, and the meanings of the concepts are rarely defined. Interaction seems to have an important role in building trusting relationships and mutual respect, communicating each other’s roles and expectations, getting support, and sharing information to support the child’s well-being.

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