Who Carries the Conversation? Five Studies on the Teacher Side of Parent Engagement
Selection methodology: We screened publications from the OECD, UNESCO, the European Commission and Eurydice, national education ministries (England’s DfE, France’s DEPP and CNESCO, and Gulf authorities including KHDA and ADEK), and peer-reviewed journals indexed across Springer, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, APA and Frontiers. A 60-day primary window (18 June – 17 August 2026) surfaced only one qualifying study, so the screening lookback was widened to twelve months (17 August 2025 – 17 August 2026). The
windowin this edition’s metadata (2025-08 — 2026-06) is narrower: it is the publication span of the five included studies, not the period searched. Inclusion criteria: published 2024 or later; peer-reviewed or issued by a recognised authority; and directly addressing school–parent communication, parental engagement, or family involvement in learning. Eleven candidates qualified, six were carried to source collection, and five are included here. All six exclusions are named. At screening: one study held over from a previous month, as outside this edition’s theme; one OECD report, where family engagement was a single section rather than the subject; one Moroccan study, on journal-tier grounds; and two US studies, as out-of-priority-geography supporting evidence. At collection: one further study, whose publisher’s paywall left the Method and Results unverifiable. No qualifying MENA or Gulf research appeared in this window at all — a gap we report rather than paper over, and one that limits how far this edition’s conclusions travel.
Parent engagement has become something schools are measured on. Inspection frameworks reference it, improvement plans commit to it, and a growing market of software promises to deliver it. These five publications raise an awkward question about that consensus: not whether parent engagement matters — that is long settled — but whether the particular things schools are now asked to do are the things the evidence supports.
Four appeared between August 2025 and June 2026; the fifth is a 2026 European Commission policy brief. They come from England, Spain, Austria and Germany, use four different designs, and converge on one point more tightly than unrelated studies usually do.
Only 39% of English Teachers Include Home Learning in Their Definition of Parent Engagement
The largest study here asked 1,782 qualified teachers across England about their training in parental engagement, their confidence, and — in a free-text question — what strong parental engagement looks like. The answers describe a workforce given a responsibility without the preparation to discharge it. Most teachers reported no training at all in which engagement activities are effective or how to identify and remove barriers, and when asked to define good practice, most described school-based activities rather than anything happening at home.
Methodology: Cross-sectional national online survey · n=1,782 qualified teachers in England, fielded June 2023 – March 2024 · England, UK · Descriptive with correlational sub-analyses — no causal claim · Limitation: Self-selected sample and self-reported measures built ad hoc because no validated instrument exists; primary teachers and headteachers overrepresented.
“Despite this low threshold for a Level 3 response, only 39% of teachers included any reference to parent–child interactions outside school in their definitions of strong parental engagement.” — Jones, Sideropoulos & Palikara (2025)
The gap widens where it matters most. Ninety-six per cent felt confident running parent–teacher meetings, but only 60% felt able to identify and remove barriers, and 50% felt able to engage parents who spoke other languages — while nearly three-quarters had never received any training on engaging parents facing poverty, language, cultural or prior-negative-school barriers. This establishes a substantial and consistent gap between what teachers are asked to do and what they have been trained to do; it does not establish what teachers actually do in practice, nor any effect on parents or pupil outcomes, since every measure here is self-reported.
Jones, C., Sideropoulos, V., & Palikara, O. (2025) — Educational Review
Spanish Early-Years Teachers Rate Purpose-Built School Apps Their Least Suitable Channel
A survey of early childhood teaching teams across Mallorca asked which digital tools they considered most and least suitable for communicating with families. The ranking is not the one a procurement committee would predict. General-purpose tools — email, institutional platforms, the school website, WhatsApp and Telegram — occupied the top of the list. The dedicated school-communication apps came last, by a wide margin.
Methodology: Descriptive-exploratory cross-sectional survey, 28-item questionnaire, Cronbach’s alpha = 0.913 (high internal consistency) · n=273 early childhood teaching staff, intentional non-probability sample · Mallorca, Spain · Descriptive — teacher perceptions only, no causal claim · Limitation: Highly localised single-island sample; the authors state explicitly that the data cannot be extrapolated.
“The results indicate that email is considered the most suitable tool for communication, as indicated by 41.4% of responses. […] On the other hand, 62.3% of the participants identify specific apps (Cifra, Yedra, Tokapp or Remind) as the least suitable.” — Urbina, Ferrer-Ribot & Villatoro Moral (2025)
A plausible explanation sits in the same dataset: 37% of these teachers taught themselves to use their communication tools through manuals, tutorials or trial and error, 26% relied on a colleague, and 61.5% said more training was needed. This establishes that a majority of teachers in one Spanish region rate purpose-built school apps below general-purpose channels for family communication; it does not establish that those apps perform worse, that parents share the view, or that the preference would hold in a different region or a probability sample.
Parent Satisfaction Tracks Conversation, Not App Feedback
This mixed-methods study followed families through the transition into early childhood care in Austria and Germany, first interviewing 13 parents and then surveying 276. It tested which communication formats were associated with parental satisfaction — and found a sharp split between formats that involve talking and formats that involve receiving.
Methodology: Exploratory sequential mixed methods — 13 guideline interviews with two-coder content analysis (79.8% agreement), then a standardised survey · n=276 parents (55.1% Austria, 43.8% Germany) · Austria and Germany · Correlational — limited causal inference · Limitation: Recruited via Facebook and Instagram parent groups, skewing the sample toward highly educated mothers reporting satisfaction retrospectively.
“Telephone feedback also showed a positive correlation with satisfaction (d = 0.45, p =.033). By contrast, digital forms of feedback, such as parent apps or messenger groups, showed no significant effects on satisfaction (all p>.70, d < 0.15).” — Pölzl-Stefanec (2025)
Informal handover conversations at drop-off and pick-up — experienced regularly by 84.1% of these parents — carried a large effect size (d = 1.13, p<.001); scheduled meetings carried a medium one (d = 0.75, p =.015). Meanwhile the structural variables schools often assume matter showed nothing: type of setting, prior experience, parental education and urban-versus-rural residence were all non-significant. This establishes a strong association between dialogue-based formats and reported parental satisfaction; it does not establish that dialogue causes satisfaction rather than satisfied parents recalling conversations more warmly, and satisfaction is not a child outcome.
Pölzl-Stefanec, E. (2025) — Early Childhood Education Journal
A 12-Month One-Way SMS Programme Showed No Detectable Effect on Early Reading
The only causal design in this edition is also the one with the least comfortable result. Tips by Text sends parents of four- and five-year-olds short, actionable suggestions for supporting language, literacy and numeracy at home. It was trialled across 109 schools in Northeast England, with 3,649 participants randomised — and it moved neither of its outcome measures.
Methodology: Two-arm randomised controlled trial, intention-to-treat, multilevel mixed-effects models with false-discovery-rate correction for multiple comparisons · 109 schools, n=3,649 randomised; ~70% COVID-driven attrition left n=753 (early reading) and n=1,037 (socioemotional) · Northeast England, UK · Causal design, but severely underpowered at analysis · Limitation: Pandemic school closures cut the primary-outcome sample from 3,649 to 753, and the trial used a passive rather than active control arm.
“Our analysis found no significant improvements in reading-related skills or socioemotional outcomes nor any meaningful differences in response to the program based on these subgroups. The high level of attrition limited the study’s power to detect effects, underscoring the need for further evaluation, which is currently underway.” — O’Reilly, Loeb, Farrell & Scerif (2025)
Two details matter for reading this correctly. First, the messages were one-way by design: parents could reply, but the research team deliberately did not respond, “to avoid researchers getting into a two-way conversation with parents.” Second, the independent evaluators reached the same null. This establishes that a well-designed trial of a specific one-way SMS programme failed to detect an effect on early reading or socioemotional outcomes, including among disadvantaged pupils, those learning English as an additional language, and those with special educational needs; it does not establish that school-to-parent messaging is ineffective. A trial that loses 70% of its sample cannot detect a small effect, and the authors are explicit that further evaluation is underway.
O’Reilly, F., Loeb, S., Farrell, A., & Scerif, G. (2025) — Journal of Educational Psychology
The European Commission Names One-Directional, Problem-Triggered Contact as the Core Failure
The Commission’s 2026 policy brief synthesises four years of the Working Group Schools mandate. It is not new research, and it reports no effect sizes — but as a statement of where EU education policy has landed, it describes the same mechanism the empirical studies above keep bumping into.
Methodology: Policy action brief — a five-page synthesis of prior EU deliverables and peer-learning discussions · Not applicable; synthesises the Working Group Schools mandate 2021–2025 · EU-wide, with named programmes in Finland, France, Ireland and Malta · Descriptive — secondary source, no new data and no effect sizes · Limitation: No methodology section and no systematic-review protocol; country examples are selected rather than systematically sampled.
“Communication is frequently limited, one-directional and problem-oriented, with parents contacted mainly when difficulties arise. […] While digital tools can support more regular communication, they do not automatically lead to meaningful involvement unless used deliberately to strengthen dialogue.” — European Commission (2026)
The brief is direct about who is expected to fix this, noting that cooperation with parents from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds “is often challenging for novice teachers, highlighting the need for dedicated training in communication, relationship-building and cultural competence.” Its remedies are structural rather than technological: Ireland’s Home School Community Liaison coordinators are teachers released from classroom duties for up to five years, mandated to spend at least a third of their time visiting homes. This establishes the current direction of EU policy thinking and identifies four national programmes as working models; it does not establish that those programmes are effective, since none is presented here with evaluation data.
European Commission (2026) — Pathways to School Success: Key role of parents
What’s Emerging
Three studies, four countries, three designs, one finding: the digital channels schools have invested in are the ones the evidence is quietest about. Spanish teachers rank purpose-built apps last among communication tools. Austrian and German parents show no measurable satisfaction difference from app or messenger feedback, while conversation-based formats show the largest effects in the dataset. And the one randomised trial in this edition tested a deliberately one-way messaging programme and detected nothing.
That convergence is not proof, and it is worth being precise about why. The trial is underpowered; the Spanish result is a localised preference, not a performance measure; the Austrian result is correlational and measures satisfaction rather than learning. No single one of these would carry much weight. What makes the pattern interesting is that three independent teams, using unrelated methods, all found the dialogic formats outperforming the broadcast ones — and the European Commission, reviewing a different body of evidence, states the mechanism outright: digital tools “do not automatically lead to meaningful involvement unless used deliberately to strengthen dialogue.”
The second pattern is about capacity. The English survey found teachers confident about the formats they were trained for — meetings — and markedly less confident about the ones nobody trained them for: identifying barriers, and reaching families who do not share the school’s language. The Commission’s brief independently names teacher preparation as a core gap. Put the two patterns together and a coherent picture appears: the evidence points toward dialogue, dialogue is expensive in teacher time, and the people expected to supply it report they were never prepared for the hardest part of it. Adding a broadcast channel does not resolve that tension. It may simply make it easier to ignore.
One further caveat travels with all of this: every study here is European. Whether the same pattern holds in Gulf or North African school systems is, on this evidence, simply untested.
What This Means for School Leaders
Audit what your channels are actually for. If most outbound volume is announcements, reminders and problem notifications, you have built a broadcast system and called it engagement. Separate the two in your own reporting: count how many contacts in a term invited a reply, and how many received one.
Protect the informal conversation rather than replacing it. The largest effect in this edition attached to unstructured handover conversations at drop-off and pick-up. Staffing and timetable decisions that quietly remove those moments — a new pick-up procedure, a gate closure, a duty rota — are engagement decisions, whether or not they are recorded as such.
Treat “we sent it” as an input, not an outcome. The one trial here that measured child outcomes from a messaging programme detected no effect on them — though heavy attrition means it could not have detected a small one. Schools can act by tracking reach and reply rates among the families least likely to respond, rather than delivery rates across the whole roll.
Budget training, not just licences. Nearly three-quarters of English teachers reported no training in engaging families facing poverty or language barriers, and 61.5% of Spanish early-years staff asked for more training in the tools themselves. A platform rollout without a training line will land on unprepared staff.
Name who owns the relationship. The Commission’s clearest examples — Ireland’s liaison coordinators, France’s schooling support centres — work by giving someone dedicated time. Schools without that capacity can start smaller, assigning named contacts for the least-engaged families rather than expecting outreach to emerge from general goodwill.
Acting on any of this requires doing two things that are harder than sending more messages: protecting time for genuine two-way conversation, and deliberately reaching the families who are not already engaged. Purpose-built school communication platforms — BeeNet among them, and the Mallorca teachers rated that category last — are one way to operationalise that, but only if they are configured for reach and reply rather than broadcast volume: per-family language handling, so that the finding that only half of teachers felt able to engage families speaking other languages is not left as the teacher’s problem to solve alone; delivery paths that reach parents who never install an app; and reporting that surfaces who has not been reached. If that is the problem you are trying to solve, you can see how that works in practice.
References
- Jones, C., Sideropoulos, V., & Palikara, O. (2025). Do teachers have the knowledge and skills to facilitate effective parental engagement? Findings from a national survey in England. Educational Review. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2025.2506802
- Urbina, S., Ferrer-Ribot, M., & Villatoro Moral, S. (2025). School-Family Communication in Early Childhood Education Through Digital Tools. International Journal of Early Childhood. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13158-025-00419-3
- Pölzl-Stefanec, E. (2025). Communication Matters: A Mixed Methods Study on Parent–Professional Interactions during Early Childhood Education and Care Transitions. Early Childhood Education Journal. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-025-02021-7
- O’Reilly, F., Loeb, S., Farrell, A., & Scerif, G. (2025). Supporting Parents to Support Children: A U.K. Randomized Controlled Trial Testing a Text Message Intervention to Cultivate the Home Learning Environment. Journal of Educational Psychology, 118(1), 12–34. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000973
- European Commission, Directorate-General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture (2026). Pathways to School Success: Key role of parents. Policy Action Brief. Publications Office of the European Union. https://doi.org/10.2766/0254890