Early Childhood Communication: What OECD Research Says Kindergarten and Crèche Directors Are Getting Wrong

TALIS Starting Strong 2024: What 15 Countries Reveal About ECEC Family Engagement

The families whose children stand to benefit most from a well-connected home–centre relationship are the families least likely to receive structured outreach — this is the central finding of Engaging Parents and Guardians in Early Childhood Education and Care Centres, an OECD report published in November 2024 drawing on TALIS Starting Strong survey data from fifteen countries and subnational entities. Multi-faceted family engagement practices are not the norm in most ECEC systems, and centres serving the most disadvantaged families do not consistently apply the stronger, more intentional engagement that the evidence base associates with better outcomes for children.

That inversion is the core problem. The OECD report makes clear that, in the absence of systematic national guidance, the practical responsibility falls on individual centre leaders. Communication design — how a centre chooses to reach out, how often, through which channels, and for which families — is the variable that research consistently associates with engagement quality.

For kindergarten and crèche directors, this is not an abstract policy debate. It is a leadership question with operational answers.

What the Data Actually Shows

The OECD’s cross-national dataset is descriptive and cross-sectional — it maps what is happening, not why. With that caveat stated once, the picture is striking.

Germany’s TALIS Starting Strong 2024 country note illustrates the pattern with particular clarity. Only 68% of German pre-primary staff and 63% of staff in under-3 settings (Kinderkrippe) report encouraging families to do play and learning activities at home — below the average across participating countries. Only 23% of pre-primary leaders in Germany offer workshops for parents at least several times a year. And only 43% of pre-primary staff had received any professional development that included working with parents.

Germany is not an outlier so much as a visible data point on a widespread pattern. Across the survey countries, the OECD’s synthesis concludes that “without deliberate inclusion strategies, parental engagement improvements risk benefitting privileged families exclusively.” When outreach is left to ad hoc initiative, it tends to reach the families who already have the cultural capital, language fluency, and schedule flexibility to engage — not the families for whom a connected centre–home relationship is most consequential.

The Eurydice Key Data on Early Childhood Education and Care in Europe 2025 report, covering 37 European systems, reinforces this point: differences in engagement practices are strongly associated with the socio-economic context of the centre and with the training staff have received in working with parents and guardians.

The Equity Inversion That Directors Must Name

The phrase “equity inversion” is not in the OECD report, but the concept is: centres serving disadvantaged populations are applying engagement practices at rates no higher — and sometimes lower — than centres in more affluent contexts. This is not a deliberate policy choice by any individual director. It is the structural outcome of leaving engagement to individual initiative without systematic design.

Research from England published in the Journal of Early Childhood Research (Demissie & Pearse, 2025) describes what the alternative can look like. In a community research centre operating in an economically challenged area, nursery provision and trusting relationships within it were associated with transformative effects on both children and parents. The authors note that “robust linkages in the mesosystem can enhance outcomes by supporting parents alongside children” — a point that underlines why family engagement is not an add-on to the educational mission but integral to it.

The Chilean evidence adds a specific dimension relevant to ECEC centres with immigrant families — a growing reality in France, Belgium, Germany, and the Gulf states. A study of 347 immigrant parents in Chilean early education centres (Bilbao et al., 2025) found that higher intercultural sensitivity was associated with greater parental involvement, and that parents with lower intercultural sensitivity were approximately 75% more likely to report minimal participation.

Communication Design Is Not the Only Barrier

Before moving to operational recommendations, intellectual honesty requires naming what communication design alone cannot solve.

Parent work schedules are among the most consistently cited barriers in the European literature. A crèche that sends a beautifully structured weekly message cannot change the fact that a parent working irregular hours cannot attend a morning workshop. Linguistic barriers require translation capacity that small centres often lack. Cultural norms around institutional authority shape whether parents feel entitled to engage at all, regardless of how often they are invited. Structural issues — underfunding, inadequate staffing ratios, limited ECEC places in disadvantaged areas — constrain what any individual centre can offer, however motivated its director.

The Eurydice 2025 report identifies these factors explicitly. Staff self-efficacy is also a significant variable: Norwegian research across 266 teachers in 56 centres (Ovati et al., 2024) found that teacher self-efficacy was associated with more frequent parent communication and fewer collaboration difficulties — suggesting that professional development targeting self-efficacy may be an important mechanism for improving parent collaboration.

Directors who address only the communication layer while ignoring these structural realities will achieve partial results. The OECD data nonetheless positions communication design as the proximate variable within a director’s control — which is the relevant frame for practical action.

What Directors Are Getting Wrong: Three Specific Gaps

Gap 1: Treating Outreach as Uniform Rather Than Differentiated

The most common error identified across the OECD report and supporting research is applying the same outreach approach to all families and expecting equivalent results. A single parent information evening, communicated through a paper notice in the child’s bag, is not a multi-faceted engagement strategy. It is a single-channel, low-frequency, administratively convenient approach that functions well for already-engaged families and poorly for everyone else.

In practice, differentiated outreach looks like this: the centre maintains a short record of each family’s preferred contact channel (WhatsApp message, phone call, written note, face-to-face at pickup), their primary language, and their available windows. For under-3 settings, the preferred channel for many families is a brief voice message rather than written text; record this explicitly. A weekly Monday message is sent in the family’s language through their preferred channel. For families who have not responded to any outreach in four weeks, a brief personal contact — by phone or at the gate — is initiated before the end of that month. The trigger is absence of engagement, not a scheduled calendar event.

Gap 2: Frontloading Engagement at Enrolment, Then Fading

The Irish “Powerful Parenting” programme, implemented by the Childhood Development Initiative in Dublin, offers one of the more carefully documented models of what sustained engagement looks like. Practitioners in the programme described the relationship-building approach in a 2025 study published in Frontiers in Sociology: “Building trusting relationships through empathic, non-judgmental communication proved essential. Tailoring support according to family needs and involving parents in planning enhanced participation.”

The key word is sustained. The programme’s dedicated Parent Carer Facilitator role existed specifically to maintain continuity — not to run a welcome event and move on. Most centres do the opposite: engagement peaks at enrolment and drops sharply once the administrative paperwork is complete.

In practice, this looks like: a structured six-month onboarding communication sequence for new families, distinct from routine operational messages, with explicit milestones — a two-week check-in, a one-month developmental note (a brief observation on the child’s settling, not a billing reminder), and a three-month informal conversation offer. After six months, families transition into the standard rhythm, but the relationship established in that window shapes long-term engagement quality.

Gap 3: Measuring Activity Instead of Reach

The OECD data on Germany notes that only 23% of pre-primary leaders offer workshops for parents at least several times a year. This is framed as a frequency problem, but the more fundamental issue is measurement: most ECEC leaders track whether activities were offered, not whether they reached the families who most needed them.

A centre that runs four parent workshops per year and tracks attendance rates has activity data. A centre that tracks which families have had substantive two-way contact in the past month — and which have not — has engagement data. The distinction matters because it changes what a director sees and therefore what they act on.

In practice, this looks like: a simple monthly register for each enrolled family, updated by room staff, with three states — active contact (family has engaged two-way in the past four weeks), passive contact (family received messages but has not responded), and no contact (no successful outreach in four weeks). The register takes ten minutes to update and makes the equity gap visible in real time rather than retrospectively.

What Structured Communication Makes Possible

The evidence from Ireland, England, Norway, and Chile points in a consistent direction: structured, relational, differentiated communication is associated with higher engagement — particularly for families who face linguistic, cultural, or logistical barriers.

But the OECD’s policy conclusion is clear: where national systems do not mandate strong engagement practices, the design choices made at the centre level are what determine whether disadvantaged families receive adequate support alongside their children.

For directors, the operational requirement is a communication infrastructure that can differentiate by family, sustain contact across the full academic year, and generate visibility into which families are not being reached. This infrastructure does not need to be technologically sophisticated — a well-maintained spreadsheet and a consistent protocol can achieve much of it. What it does require is deliberate design and leadership commitment to treat family engagement as a measurable outcome, not an aspiration.

For centres ready to implement this at scale, platforms designed specifically for ECEC family communication — including BeeNet, which supports multilingual messaging, per-family channel preferences, and engagement tracking across a centre’s full family population — offer one implementation path toward making that infrastructure systematic and sustainable.

Why ‘Wait for Policy’ Is No Longer a Defensible Position

The OECD published this data in November 2024. The Eurydice Key Data followed in 2025. The Norwegian, Chilean, and Irish studies appeared within the same window. The convergence is not coincidental: the evidence base on ECEC family engagement has reached a point of sufficient density that “we don’t know enough yet” is no longer a defensible position for individual centre leaders.

Directors who wait for national policy to mandate better engagement practices will continue to operate within the equity inversion the OECD has now documented. Directors who treat communication design as a leadership priority — differentiated, sustained, and measured — are not ahead of the evidence. They are aligned with it. The question is not whether to act, but how soon.

References

OECD Directorate for Education and Skills. (2024). Engaging Parents and Guardians in Early Childhood Education and Care Centres. OECD Education Policy Perspectives, No. 110. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED673296
Demissie, F., & Pearse, S. (2025). Parental engagement and transformation as a marker of quality in Early Childhood Education and Care. Journal of Early Childhood Research. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1476718X241293899
Leitão, C., & Shumba, J. (2025). Parenting support in ECEC services: the views of practitioners implementing a model in the Irish context. Frontiers in Sociology. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12061993/
EACEA, Eurydice Network. (2025). Key Data on Early Childhood Education and Care in Europe — 2025. European Commission. https://eurydice.eacea.ec.europa.eu/publications/key-data-early-childhood-education-and-care-europe-2025
Ovati, et al. (2024). Teacher perceptions of parent collaboration in multi-ethnic ECEC settings. Frontiers in Education. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/education/articles/10.3389/feduc.2024.1340295/full
Bilbao, et al. (2025). Parental involvement of immigrant parents in early educational centers and its relationship with intercultural sensitivity. Frontiers in Psychology. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1568532/full
OECD. (2025). Results from TALIS Starting Strong 2024: Germany Country Note. https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2025/11/results-from-talis-starting-strong-2024-country-notes_aafa21dc/germany_21acb1d7/fbf3052d-en.pdf