Communicating clearly with parents and carers is a crucial step for schools every single day. It’s easy to get it right when you have the right process in place, but a few common missteps can leave parents confused or disengaged.
Here we’ve compiled the top five common mistakes from our daily conversations with tools, and the best ways to avoid each one.
One-way communication
School staff can sometimes get caught up in sending messages out to families, and forget to make space for a two-way conversation. Newsletters and paper letters aren’t the easiest things for parents to reply to, but emails and text messages can have the same problem depending on how your system is set up.
Without the opportunity to engage, parents can feel like their voices aren’t being heard, and might become disengaged. In fact, 42% of parents reported feeling this way in a study by the Education Endowment Foundation.
How to fix it: Enabling two-way messaging (available with Teachers2Parents and Groupcall via our Xpressions mobile app) allows parents to reply to real-time updates. This can be the most efficient way for schools to get quick answers to questions about attendance or booking meetings, and parents can feel more connected.
Infrequent updates
Many parents have a perception that they only hear from their school when something is wrong. If the only messages they receive are about things like absences or behaviour issues, this can negatively impact engagement.
Proactive, consistent communication helps to build trust and encourages parents to play an active role in their child’s education. Sharing updates about pupils’ successes can also help with positive reinforcement both at home and in school.
How to fix it: It’s important to maintain a balance of positive communications while keeping parents in the loop about any urgent concerns. Using notifications in the Xpressions app can be a great way to keep parents informed without sending an overwhelming number of text messages.
Confusing, inconsistent messaging
It’s good to use different channels for different types of communications, but it should be clear to parents why you are using a particular method to deliver your message. Using too many different channels with no consistency can lead to parents and carers feeling overwhelmed. This will often lead them to either ignore your communications completely, or have to call the school office to ask for clarification.
How to fix it: Make sure you have a clear internal process for when to use texts, emails, app notifications, website posts or other channels to communicate. You can check out our guide “Every Message Counts” for more guidance on how to use different channels for different messages!
Ignoring language barriers
Many schools still struggle to make suitable accommodations for communicating with family members who don’t speak English as a first language. If parents are unable to understand messages clearly, this can be a major reason for them disengaging. For schools with a higher proportion of pupils who speak different languages at home, this problem becomes more significant.
How to fix it: Automatic translation into pupils’ home language is the most seamless way for SMS and email messages to be better understood. This is available in Groupcall and the Xpressions app, and can be a huge help with parental engagement.
No timeline of communication
Getting your message across on any given day is one issue, but in the longer term it can still be difficult for both parents and schools to keep track of all communications. It can be difficult to refer back to earlier updates about attendance issues, previous behaviour incidents and tracking academic progress clearly over time.
How to fix it: One of the advantages of the Xpressions app is that parents can see a student-specific timeline (and switch between multiple children if needed) covering all messages and notifications in chronological order. This is great for transparency and helps both parents and staff refer back to earlier events when having conversations.
Tackling these issues one at a time, you can see how a little planning can go a long way. It’s particularly important to get the right technology solutions in place, and ensure these complement the processes your staff are following.
Ultimately, by avoiding these common school communication problems and streamlining your parental engagement, you can help students get better support from their families at home as well as from teachers and staff in school.