OECD to Schools: Close Family Collaboration Gaps With Immigrant Families

When the OECD reviews a national education system, its recommendations tend to be broad — funding formulas, curriculum reform, teacher pipelines. So it’s notable that its 2026 review of Catalonia, Spain, singles out something much more specific: how schools talk to immigrant families. If a meaningful share of your families don’t share the school’s language of instruction at home, this recommendation is describing your building, not just Catalonia’s.

The report identifies “family-school engagement challenges” as persisting specifically “for disadvantaged and immigrant communities,” and issues a direct recommendation — 3.5 — to “enhance school-family collaboration to foster inclusion, especially with immigrant families” (OECD, 2026). The recommendation isn’t confined to Spain: schools with large newly-arrived or multilingual populations, uneven family-school communication infrastructure, and a single generic outreach model stretched across very different family circumstances exist well outside Catalonia too — international and expat schools across the Gulf, immigrant-heavy districts in France and Belgium, and any school where a meaningful share of families don’t share the language of instruction at home.

This article looks at what the OECD found, what independent research says about why it matters, and what schools serving multilingual or newly-arrived families can actually do about it.

What the OECD Found in Catalonia — and Why It Travels

The OECD’s finding does not frame immigrant families as disengaged from their children’s education. It reads more as schools’ collaboration structures with those families being underdeveloped relative to need. That distinction matters: the gap the OECD points to looks institutional, not parental.

This matters for the framing of any response. A school that treats low engagement from immigrant families as a family-side problem risks designing outreach that doesn’t move the needle. Schools that want to close this gap would need to treat it as a structural gap in their own communication design — a broad category that could include language access, cultural framing, or channel choice — rather than something families are expected to solve on their own.

The Catalonia review doesn’t name individual schools; its recommendation is systemic. But it lines up closely with more granular research on what specifically predicts whether immigrant parents get involved.

The Research Behind the Recommendation

A 2025 peer-reviewed study in Frontiers in Psychology, surveying 347 immigrant parents in Chile, tested exactly the mechanism the OECD gestures at: does it matter whether parents perceive their child’s school as having a tailored approach for immigrant families? The answer was one of the strongest effects in the dataset.

Parents who perceived that their school lacked “a special approach for immigrant families” were 3.79 times more likely to fall into the low-participation group (Bilbao et al., 2025). That’s a large effect for a single perception variable, and it’s associational rather than causal — the study measured self-reported involvement against survey predictors, not a tested intervention. But it’s a striking empirical echo of the OECD’s Recommendation 3.5: schools that don’t visibly signal a tailored approach tend to be the ones associated with lower parent participation.

The same study found that parents with lower intercultural sensitivity were 75% more likely to report “almost never” participating, compared to parents with high intercultural sensitivity — suggesting the relationship runs partly through how welcome and culturally recognized parents feel, not just logistics like translated forms.

The Paradox of High-Immigrant-Enrollment Schools

One finding from the same study is worth flagging because it cuts against the intuitive assumption. Schools with higher numbers of immigrant-background families paradoxically correlated with lower average parental involvement — a pattern the researchers suggest may reflect integration preferences among some parent populations rather than a simple “more immigrant families, less engagement” causal story. The honest reading is that raw enrollment share isn’t a reliable predictor either way; what predicts involvement is whether families perceive the school as built around them specifically, regardless of how many other immigrant families are enrolled.

The Limits of Better Outreach

That paradox is a reminder that perception, not headcount, drives the effect — but perception itself is only part of the picture. It would overstate the case to present family-collaboration design as the single lever schools have. A 2024 research brief from EdResearch for Action — synthesizing the broader academic literature on immigrant-origin students — is explicit that differences in achievement between immigrant-origin and native-born students “primarily result from variations in family and school resources,” not immigration status itself (Sattin-Bajaj & Strom, 2024). Socio-economic disparities, access to school resources, and broader integration conditions documented in OECD’s own comparative data on immigrant-background children across member countries (OECD/IDAC, 2025) all shape outcomes independently of how well a school communicates with families. Family collaboration is a lever schools directly control; it is not a substitute for addressing resource gaps that sit largely outside a single school’s mandate. Both matter, and administrators should hold that honestly rather than treating better outreach as a complete fix.

What Tailored Collaboration Looks Like in Practice

The OECD recommendation is deliberately general — it doesn’t prescribe a method. But named programmes already operating give a concrete sense of what “a special approach for immigrant families” looks like when institutionalized rather than left to individual teachers’ goodwill.

Belgium’s DASPA programme is the clearest funded example at regional scale, established through a 2019 decree for Belgium’s French-speaking Community (Wallonia-Brussels). Backed by €4.25 million through the EU’s AMIF 2021-2027 fund, it now runs across 187 primary and 70 secondary institutions, serving roughly 2,338 secondary students a year, with Brussels accounting for over a third of enrollments (European Commission, 2024). Its academic core is intensive language instruction — 16 hours a week of French for newly arrived students. But the programme’s own documentation is candid about a gap directly relevant to this article: the “Integration Councils,” meant to include psycho-medical-social representatives, are described as only “ideally” present, with formal requirements “remain[ing] loose” and insufficient psychological-support staffing cited as an ongoing weakness. At the Redouté-Peiffer Institute, one school implementing DASPA, the director’s stated philosophy toward adapting instruction to students is instructive: success “depends on individual adaptation rather than formulaic approaches” — a principle that arguably applies just as well to how a school approaches individual families, not only to classroom teaching.

In the United States, several districts have built structures around the same idea. Fairfax County Public Schools partnered with the Smithsonian Learning Lab; Boston Public Schools runs “We Dream Together”; Annandale High School has an Immigrant Parent Leadership Initiative; and California’s Mexican Immigrant Parent Empowerment Initiative found that involving immigrant families directly in school decision-making “boosted parental engagement, fostering a stronger sense of belonging” (Sattin-Bajaj & Strom, 2024). The Internationals Network’s “Newcomer Welcome Kit” and Glendale, California’s library partnership are smaller-scale but point at the same design principle: make the tailored approach visible and structural, not incidental.

In practice, this looks like…

Three concrete patterns emerge from these named examples, translated into communication design a school could run this term:

A newcomer welcome sequence. Triggered the moment a newly-arrived or non-native-language family enrolls: a 3-message sequence over the first two weeks — one in the family’s home language via app notification introducing the child’s teacher and how to reach them, one explaining how to read report cards and attendance alerts, one inviting the parent to a 20-minute in-person or video orientation. Modeled on the structural intent behind the Internationals Network’s Newcomer Welcome Kit.
A translated, two-way channel for ongoing contact — not one-way bulletins. A short weekly digest (under 150 words) sent in the family’s preferred language, with a reply option routed to a staff member or interpreter line, mirroring the accessible-communication obligation and interpretation-hotline model documented for U.S. districts.
A family-advisory touchpoint, not just a newsletter. A termly 30-minute structured input session — in person or by video — where a small rotating group of immigrant-background parents reviews upcoming decisions (schedule changes, new programmes) before they’re finalized, echoing the involvement-in-decision-making design credited with boosting engagement in California’s Mexican Immigrant Parent Empowerment Initiative.

None of these require large budgets. What they require is that the tailored approach be a designed, repeatable structure — visible to families as something the school built for them — rather than something that depends on which teacher happens to reach out.

Building This Without Reinventing the Wheel

For school administrators in France, Belgium, Morocco, the UAE, or Saudi Arabia — anywhere a meaningful share of families operate in a second or third language relative to the school’s language of instruction — see how this fits into broader school communication. The OECD’s recommendation translates into a short list of design questions:

Does every newly-enrolled or non-native-language family get a defined, multi-touch onboarding sequence, or does contact happen ad hoc?
Can families read attendance, grade, and behavior communications in their preferred language without relying on their child to translate?
Is there a standing structure (not a one-off event) where immigrant-background parents give input before decisions are finalized, not just after?
Would a parent from one of these families say, unprompted, that the school “has a special approach for immigrant families” — the exact perception whose absence the Frontiers study associated with 3.79x higher odds of falling into the low-participation group?

Most schools already have some pieces of this. What the OECD recommendation and the supporting research both point to is that the pieces need to be assembled into something families can see and name, not left as individual accommodations.

Communication platforms that support per-family language preference, structured onboarding sequences, and two-way translated messaging make this operationally realistic at scale — whether a school has three home languages or forty, running a tailored newcomer sequence through manual phone calls and paper letters stops scaling long before the tailoring does. BeeNet is one implementation path built for exactly this: language-preference-aware messaging, structured announcement sequences, and two-way parent channels that don’t depend on a bilingual staff member being free that week. See how the communication features work, or if you’d rather walk through a newcomer-onboarding sequence for your own family population, request a demo.

The OECD didn’t recommend a specific tool — it recommended an outcome. But for schools weighing whether to formalize this now or wait for the next accreditation cycle to force the issue, the research is consistent enough that the real question is when to build the structure, not if.

References

OECD. (2026, July). Improving Learning Outcomes in Catalonia, Spain. https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2026/07/improving-learning-outcomes-in-catalonia-spain_1b5d0033/238d6264-en.pdf
Sattin-Bajaj, C., & Strom, A. (2024, April). Promoting School Success for Immigrant-Origin Students (Brief No. 9). EdResearch for Action. https://edresearchforaction.org/research-briefs/promoting-school-success-for-immigrant-origin-students/
OECD & International Data Alliance for Children on the Move (IDAC). (2025, June). The Integration of Children of Immigrants in OECD Countries (Migration Data Brief No. 15). https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2025/06/the-integration-of-children-of-immigrants-in-oecd-countries_64b6cd98/acec9b49-en.pdf
European Commission, Directorate-General for Migration and Home Affairs. (2024). DASPA: Belgium’s Educational Programme for Newly Arrived Students. https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/projects/daspa-belgiums-educational-programme-newly-arrived-students_en
Bilbao, N., Guglielmetti-Serrano, C., Mera-Lemp, M. J., Pizarro, P., Fernandez, A., & Martínez-Zelaya, D. (2025, May). 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