School relationships have been shown to significantly influence educational experiences and outcomes. However, the social and cultural factors that shape relationships at school and the ways that future teachers are being prepared to participate in these relationships are still under researched, especially in post-communist countries. This study examines how school relationships are conceptualised in Ukrainian teacher education textbooks in the Soviet and post-Soviet eras. Our analysis shows that while the main concepts of socially useful labour and citizen socialisation (vospitanie) remain, their communist ideological background has been replaced by the ideas of national/folk pedagogy. The major changes in the conceptualisations of school relationships include an increased emphasis on the individual while still retaining the significance of the collective, and increased avenues for decision-making. The ideals of cooperation and tolerance were well developed in conceptualisations of school relationships in the Soviet era; further study of these ideals and the ways in which they are developed within school relationships could inform contemporary pedagogical theory and practice. Finally, the study found that both Soviet and post-Soviet conceptualisations use loaded terms such as 'democratic' or 'authoritarian' without sufficient explanation and lack practical instructions about how to implement existing ideals into practice.