Closing the Father Engagement Gap in School Communication

When a school sends a message to “parents,” who actually reads it? Across digital platform studies, parenting program evaluations, and systematic reviews of measurement instruments, the answer is consistent: almost always the mother.

This is not primarily a question of fathers being absent or disinterested. In MENA, 96% of fathers live in the household. Yet engagement gaps between fathers and mothers remain large — and the evidence points at the design of school communication systems as a significant contributing factor, not at paternal indifference. The systems route everything to the primary caregiver, the primary caregiver is assumed to be the mother, and fathers receive no message, no schedule, no invitation framed for them.

Father involvement is independently associated with measurable child developmental outcomes. The cost of the current default is real. And the structural changes that shift it are practical, documented, and available now.

When Research Itself Mistakes “Parents” for “Mothers”

The measurement problem starts at the research level. A 2025 PRISMA systematic review of 43 parental school involvement instruments — spanning six databases covering studies from 2000 to 2024 — found that gender differences in parental involvement are “minimally addressed” across the literature, and that father engagement is largely absent from analysis (Mocho et al., 2025). Only 11 of the 43 instruments reviewed had clearly identified theoretical frameworks. The research infrastructure that administrators rely on to understand family engagement has, for decades, conflated “parents” with “mothers.” You cannot see the gap if your measurement tools do not look for it.

The same pattern appears at the practice level. A 2022 qualitative study documenting teacher use of email, texting, and ClassDojo with preschool “parents” found that every parent participant who responded and engaged was a mother (Chen & Rivera-Vernazza, 2022). The authors flagged this as a significant methodological limitation — all respondents who engaged with the school’s digital channels were mothers — and called for future research to recruit fathers explicitly. This study is four years old and was conducted under pandemic conditions; the platform landscape has expanded since. But the design default it documented — single primary contact, effectively maternal — remains common in mainstream school communication platforms.

The MENA Reality: Present in the Home, Absent From the Loop

The explanation that fathers are “unavailable” or “absent” does not account for what the data actually show. A 2024 World Bank Research Observer review of early childhood development data across low- and middle-income countries — including MENA-region data — found that 96% of fathers in MENA live in the household (Evans & Jakiela, 2024). Yet those fathers engage in an average of 1.3 stimulating activities per day compared to mothers’ 2.9 out of 6 possible activities. Physical presence in the home does not produce engagement at school. The bottleneck is structural access to information and the framing of programs as relevant to fathers in the first place.

A 2023 systematic review of 39 digital parenting intervention studies across 13 countries adds precision: only 26% of those studies targeted fathers specifically, and the review concludes that interventions “oriented primarily toward mothers without being adapted for fathers can be ineffective” (Bailin Xie et al., 2023). This finding is from 2023 and the digital intervention field has grown since; the underlying design principle remains unchanged: reaching fathers requires deliberate adaptation, not passive inclusion under a generic “parents” label.

The same design logic applies wherever schools rely on a single registered contact per family: if fathers are not explicitly addressed, directly contacted, and reached at times that fit their schedules, the system is functionally mother-only regardless of what the enrollment form says.

Why This Gap Has Consequences Beyond Attendance Figures

The case for addressing the father engagement gap is not only procedural. A 2024 systematic review from the University of Geneva and Lausanne University Hospital examined paternal involvement and child emotion regulation across early childhood. The review found that greater paternal involvement correlates with better child emotion regulation outcomes between 24 and 36 months — specifically, greater paternal bedtime involvement was associated with fewer maternal-reported emotion regulation difficulties (r = −.35, p < .01), while disengaged paternal behaviour correlates with increased emotional underregulation (Puglisi et al., 2024). These are correlational associations, not evidence of direct causation, but the pattern holds across distinct measurement contexts.

For school administrators, the operational implication is direct. When a school’s communication system routes all information to one parent by default — and that parent is implicitly assumed to be the mother — the other parent is structurally unable to be informed or respond. The gap does not narrow without deliberate design change.

Father Involvement Is Not the Only Lever

Before moving to recommendations, the evidence calls for honest framing. A 2023 systematic review of 84 school effectiveness studies found that teacher quality, instructional leadership, school culture, and resource levels each independently predict school outcomes, operating separately from family engagement levels (Javornik & Klemenčič Mirazchiyski, 2023). A 2024 multi-school quantitative study across nine Ethiopian high schools found classroom management quality significantly associated with mathematics achievement regardless of students’ socioeconomic backgrounds (Engida et al., 2024). Father engagement is one lever among several. Schools facing persistent underperformance driven by resource gaps, high teacher turnover, or weak instructional leadership will not reverse trajectory solely by adding fathers to the messaging list. The argument here is narrower: communication design is a variable administrators control directly, without budget cycles or policy changes, and in schools already operating at a reasonable baseline, it is low-cost and high-reach.

Three Structural Shifts That Change Who Shows Up

The most relevant analogue comes from a 2024 qualitative process evaluation of a parenting programme — not a school communication system, but one whose structural design changes transfer directly: the Moments That Matter (MTM) programme in rural Western Kenya, originally designed for female caregivers (Jeong et al., 2024). Early Childhood Development Promoters documented near-zero male attendance: two of seven observed group sessions had zero male caregivers, and no fathers attended any of the observed home visits. Facilitators reported that fathers believed the programme “concerns mothers and not fathers” — not that they were unwilling, but that no one had designed the invitation to reach them.

Three structural changes were then implemented: strategic scheduling at times fathers could attend, male peer facilitators for some sessions, and reframing communication to make explicit that the programme was relevant to fathers as caregivers. Father participation observably increased, and facilitators reported fathers began to reconceptualise their caregiving role.

This is a qualitative process evaluation in a specific rural context, not a controlled trial of a school communication system — the design principles transfer, but schools should track their own participation data.

1. Schedule for the Second Caregiver

Communications that arrive during school hours, and parent meetings scheduled exclusively at midday, reach stay-at-home caregivers — and largely no one else. MTM facilitators found that scheduling contact at times fathers were actually available changed who responded.

In practice, this looks like: a Monday 7:00 AM push notification sent to both registered guardians summarising the week’s three key updates; a parent-teacher conference invitation that offers a 12:30 PM slot and a 6:30 PM slot, with each family confirming which guardian attends which; and a Friday 6:00 PM digest sent directly to both contacts rather than at 9:00 AM when one parent may not yet be reachable.

2. Address Fathers Directly, Not Through Proxy

A message addressed to “Chers parents” routes in practice to whoever is registered as the primary contact. If that person is the mother, the father receives nothing — not because the school excluded him, but because the data model had only one slot. Schools that want fathers directly informed need to make them direct recipients, not downstream via their spouse.

In practice, this looks like: adding a dedicated field at student enrollment — “Father / second guardian mobile number,” with a visible note that he will receive independent direct messages; routing the weekly summary to both numbers with the child’s name personalised in each message; and addressing messages as “Cher M. Benali, voici le bilan de la semaine pour Inès” rather than a generic salutation that a parent may or may not forward.

3. Frame Relevance Explicitly for Fathers

MTM facilitators found that once fathers understood the programme was about their child’s development — and not a support structure for mothers — conceptual resistance dropped. The belief that “this concerns mothers, not fathers” persisted specifically because nobody designed the communication to say otherwise.

In practice, this looks like: a September back-to-school message sent directly to fathers stating “Your involvement as a father is associated with your child’s development — this year, you’ll receive a direct weekly update from the school”; a notification sent specifically to the father when the trimester report is posted, with one sentence summarising the key result and a direct link to the full report; or a parent-teacher meeting invitation addressed to the father by name that includes the child’s most recent progress point in the invitation text itself, so the relevance is immediate and personal.

Making the Shift Operational

These three design principles are straightforward to articulate and genuinely difficult to execute without the right infrastructure. Most school communication platforms were built with a single-contact assumption embedded in the data model. Changing that assumption — capturing fathers’ contact details, routing messages to two people independently, tracking whether the father opened a notification separately from the mother — requires a platform designed with multiple guardians as a first-class concept, not a workaround.

For schools working to close the parent engagement gap, the structural requirement is the same regardless of geography: a communication system that treats every enrolled family as a unit with multiple independent recipients, where scheduling, direct addressing, and relevance framing can be managed without manual exceptions for every student. Platforms designed with this model — BeeNet among them — treat multi-guardian delivery as a structural assumption: independent contact per guardian, message history visible to administrators, no manual exceptions per family. If your current platform routes all family communication through a single primary contact, the design gap documented in this article is not a policy problem. It is a system problem, and it will not close with a memo.

The three structural changes the MTM evaluation documented are practical, low-cost, and available now. The question for school administrators is not whether father engagement matters — the evidence is clear enough on that. The question is whether your communication system is built to reach both parents, and if it is not, when you change it.

References

Mocho, H., Martins, C., dos Santos, R., Ratinho, E., & Nunes, C. (2025). Measuring Parental School Involvement: A Systematic Review. European Journal of Investigation in Health, Psychology and Education. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12191724/
Puglisi, N., Rattaz, V., Favez, N., & Tissot, H. (2024). Father involvement and emotion regulation during early childhood: a systematic review. BMC Psychology. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11575111/
Jeong, J., et al. (2024). Fathers’ engagement in a parenting program primarily intended for female caregivers: An early qualitative process evaluation in Western Kenya. PLOS Global Public Health. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11469494/
Evans, D. K., & Jakiela, P. (2024). The Role of Fathers in Promoting Early Childhood Development in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: A Review of the Evidence. World Bank Research Observer. https://academic.oup.com/wbro/article/40/2/211/7690325
Chen, J. J., & Rivera-Vernazza, D. E. (2022). Communicating Digitally: Building Preschool Teacher-Parent Partnerships Via Digital Technologies During COVID-19. Early Child Education Journal. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9244098/
Bailin Xie, E., et al. (2023). Digital Parenting Interventions for Fathers of Infants From Conception to the Age of 12 Months: Systematic Review of Mixed Methods Studies. Journal of Medical Internet Research. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10413237/
Javornik, Š., & Klemenčič Mirazchiyski, E. (2023). Factors Contributing to School Effectiveness: A Systematic Literature Review. European Journal of Investigation in Health, Psychology and Education. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10606047/
Engida, M. A., Iyasu, A. S., & Fentie, Y. M. (2024). Impact of teaching quality on student achievement: student evidence. Frontiers in Education. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/education/articles/10.3389/feduc.2024.1367317/full