What Parents Actually Want from School Technology — and the Gap Schools Are Creating

The Promise Schools Are Failing to Keep

A 2026 systematic review of 51 empirical studies found that even as digital tools improve parental involvement and student support, schools are systematically failing on three parent-reported barriers — overcommunication, privacy neglect, and linguistic exclusion — that are eroding the gains. That review, published in Review of Education by Lee, Gao, Tan, and An, reached a conclusion that should sit uncomfortably with every school leader: technology-mediated school-home communication is associated with better parental involvement and improved support for student learning, yet the very parents schools are trying to reach consistently flag three barriers that schools are almost entirely failing to address.

Those barriers — overcommunication across fragmented platforms, unresolved privacy and data-security concerns, and digital tools that do not fit families’ linguistic and cultural contexts — are not minor friction points. Together, they are building a trust deficit that threatens to erode the genuine gains that thoughtful digital communication can deliver.

What 51 Studies Found

Parental involvement matters — but it is declining

A 2024 European Commission synthesis of PISA 2022 data — still the most recent EU-wide analysis on this question — found that active family engagement is associated with markedly higher test scores, particularly in mathematics, even when controlling for socioeconomic status. The analysis describes active parental engagement as “a decisive factor in nurturing academic proficiency” independent of family income or background.

The troubling context: parental involvement declined across nearly all EU countries between 2018 and 2022, with COVID-era disruptions accelerating the drop. Romania was the only EU country where parent-initiated school discussions increased over this period. No EU country showed growth in parental involvement in teacher-initiated discussions. This is the stakes — the communication gap has real correlates in how students perform.

It is important to be precise here. The PISA data shows an association between parental involvement and academic outcomes, not a causal chain. Involvement does not mechanically produce higher scores; the relationship is more complex than that. But the direction of the association — and its consistency across countries and income levels — means that the communication failures documented below are not minor UX problems. They are decisions that carry measurable academic risk.

Three barriers schools keep failing to fix

The Lee et al. review gives us the clearest diagnostic picture available. Across 51 studies, three parent-reported concerns appeared with consistent regularity.

Overcommunication without prioritization. Parents broadly welcome digital communication. Email is by far the most used and most appreciated channel, valued specifically for its “asynchronous nature and ease of integration into daily routines.” But schools have layered platform on top of platform — portals, apps, SMS services, email newsletters — without a coherent information architecture. The result is what Lee et al. describe as “overcommunication across multiple platforms without clear prioritization.” Parents receive everything, can prioritize nothing, and begin to disengage from all of it.

Real-world data reinforces this. A 2025 survey of more than 275 educators, parents, and curriculum leaders by Cornerstone Communications and Edsby found that schools without integrated systems were running 10 to 15 apps simultaneously. Forty-two percent of parents rated their satisfaction at 5 out of 10 or lower when forced to navigate multiple apps, citing navigation difficulties. The administrator perception gap is striking: 80% of school administrators believed teachers were satisfied with their platform arrangements, while approximately one-third of teachers rated satisfaction at 2 out of 10, citing administrative overhead and fragmented user experience.

Privacy and data-security concerns. Across the studies reviewed by Lee et al., parents consistently raised concerns about how their children’s data was being collected, stored, and shared. Schools have tended to treat these concerns as perceptions to be managed with reassuring language. The data suggests they should be treated as legitimate institutional accountability failures.

A 2025 analysis drawing on CoSN’s State of EdTech report and FTC regulatory data put the risk in concrete terms: ransomware attacks on K-12 schools increased by 92% between 2022 and 2023. The Student Privacy Pledge — the primary self-regulatory framework for edtech vendors, in place since 2014 — was retired in May 2025 on the grounds that self-regulation was no longer considered sufficient. Meanwhile, 80% of districts report generative AI initiatives already underway, while 43% lack formal policies or guidance for AI use. Schools are, as the analysis put it, “sitting on more data than ever before without adequate safeguards.”

Parents who express concern about their children’s digital data are not being irrational. They are reading an institutional record that validates their anxiety.

Cultural and linguistic exclusion. The third barrier is the quietest and, in MENA and European school contexts, among the most consequential. Lee et al. found that digital divides disproportionately affect lower-income and immigrant families — not only through access gaps, but through tools designed without their languages or communication norms in mind. A parent who receives school updates only in the dominant national language, or through an app built around assumptions about digital fluency that do not match their experience, is not merely inconvenienced. They are effectively excluded from the school-home partnership.

What Schools Cannot Control — and What They Can

It would be misleading to suggest that better communication design alone closes the gap. A 2025 systematic review in Review of Educational Research by Badiuzzaman, Lee, and Cumming found that digital skills gaps — not raw access to devices — are the most prevalent challenge in technology-integrated family-school partnerships. Only 35.8% of parents effectively used school websites despite 75.1% of schools relying on them. Even well-designed, linguistically appropriate platforms will not reach families where foundational digital literacy is absent. Separately, 67% of surveyed parents preferred mobile devices as their primary access method — a finding that should shape platform choices. Infrastructure and funding constraints are also real: UK government survey data from 2024-25 found 95% of school leaders citing budget as a barrier to technology uptake, and only 22% operating formal frameworks to evaluate whether their technology choices are working. These are structural constraints that individual schools cannot solve alone. Budget and digital literacy constraints are real — but they do not explain the communication design failures that school leaders have the authority to change tomorrow.

What Closing the Gap Looks Like in Practice

Acknowledging the structural constraints does not excuse the communication design failures that schools can control. Here is what the evidence points toward.

Consolidate channels around how parents actually communicate

Platform proliferation is not a parent problem — it is a school governance problem. Schools that run 10 to 15 parallel apps are making choices administrators have the authority to change. In practice, this looks like designating a single primary channel for routine communication — one app or messaging platform — and reserving email for documentation and formal correspondence. A weekly three-bullet message sent through whichever channel a family uses most, summarizing the week’s work and flagging any upcoming deadline, with no attachments and no PDF, gives parents something actionable and predictable.

For sensitive matters — learning difficulties, behavioral issues, conflicts — Lee et al. found that parents significantly prefer phone or in-person communication, concerned that written messages could be misread. That preference should be systematized, not overridden.

Be specific and honest about data governance

Schools that wait for a cybersecurity incident to communicate about data practices have already lost the trust argument. In practice, this looks like a plain-language annual notice — two paragraphs, sent at the start of the school year in each family’s preferred language — that names which platforms are in use, what data each one collects, who can access it, and what the school does when a vendor changes its terms. This is not a legal compliance exercise; it is a relationship-maintenance exercise.

Design for linguistic and cultural fit from the start

Multilingual communication should not be a translation add-on. In practice, this looks like a brief monthly update — one short paragraph — sent in the parent’s preferred language through a single channel rather than simultaneously across email, SMS, and paper. A practical starting point: identify the three most common non-dominant languages in your enrollment and commit to translating the weekly parent update into each. Nothing else. Build from there. The goal is not comprehensive translation of every document. It is ensuring that the most important recurring communications reach every family in a form they can actually use. For schools in MENA and European contexts with significant multilingual populations, this is an equity issue as much as a service-quality issue.

The Gap Is Closeable — but Only If Schools Acknowledge It

The administrator-reality gap documented in the 2025 Cornerstone/Edsby research is, in some ways, the most important finding of all. Schools cannot close a trust gap they do not perceive. The first step is taking the parent-reported barriers in the Lee et al. review seriously — not as communication preferences to be accommodated if convenient, but as evidence of implementation failures that are actively undermining the gains digital communication can deliver.

Schools that consolidate their platforms, communicate honestly about data governance, and build multilingual accessibility into their default communication design are not doing parents a favor. They are doing the work that makes the investment in school technology worthwhile.

For schools looking for a practical starting point, BeeNet is built around the design principles the Lee et al. review points toward: a single consolidated channel, multilingual by default, and data governance designed for school accountability requirements — not retrofitted from a consumer app. The decisions, however, belong to school leaders. The evidence for making them is already in hand.

References

1. Lee, S. M. S., Gao, L., Tan, C. Y., & An, Q. (2026). What parents expect from digital communication with schools [Systematic review]. Review of Education, Wiley/BERA. https://doi.org/10.1002/rev3.70137 (Summarized at https://theeconomyofmeaning.com/2026/02/09/what-parents-expect-from-digital-communication-with-schools/)

2. European Education and Culture Executive Agency / European Commission. (2024). PISA 2022 perspectives on parental involvement. School Education Gateway. https://school-education.ec.europa.eu/en/discover/news/pisa-2022-perspectives-parental-involvement

3. Badiuzzaman, Md., Lee, J.-S., & Cumming, T. M. (2025). A systematic review of the impact of the multilevel digital divide in technology-integrated family–school partnerships. Review of Educational Research. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/00346543251400771

4. Ascione, L. (2025, April 28). ‘Too many apps for that’ in schools. eSchool News. https://www.eschoolnews.com/digital-learning/2025/04/28/too-many-apps-for-that-in-schools/

5. Cornerstone Communications, LTD. / Edsby. (2025). App overload: How a fragmented digital landscape is failing K-12 education [Press release]. PR Newswire. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-research-report-unveils-educational-app-overload-in-k12-schools-302397684.html

6. Gera, R. R. (2025, July 30). Data, privacy, and cybersecurity in schools: A 2025 wake-up call. eSchool News. https://www.eschoolnews.com/digital-learning/2025/07/30/data-privacy-and-cybersecurity-in-schools-a-2025-wake-up-call/

7. Thompson, E. (2024). DfE tech survey reveals major shifts in school AI use, digital strategy, and infrastructure gaps. EdTech Innovation Hub. https://www.edtechinnovationhub.com/news/dfe-tech-survey-reveals-major-shifts-in-school-ai-use-digital-strategy-and-infrastructure-gaps