New research from Project Tomorrow puts a number on that difference: 80% of US district leaders believe families are satisfied with school communication, but only 56% of families say they are. That’s a 24-point gap between what schools think they’re delivering and what parents actually experience.
Ask a school leader how communication with parents is going, and most will say it’s going well. Ask the parents, and you’ll hear something different.
What the research found
The study, published in October 2026 by Project Tomorrow in collaboration with ClassDojo, surveyed more than 250 school district leaders and drew on national family survey data. It focuses on US public school districts, but anyone who has worked in an international or independent school will recognise the pattern. Schools measure communication by what they send out. Parents judge it by what they actually learn.
Sending more isn’t the same as telling parents more
Most schools aren’t short on communication. There’s the weekly newsletter, the term calendar, the WhatsApp class group, the email about uniform, and the reminder about the email about uniform. By volume, parents are well served. The trouble is that most of these messages are about the school, not about the child. A newsletter tells a parent what happened at assembly. It doesn’t tell them whether their daughter has settled into maths, or why their son was marked late three times this month.
The research points the same way. When families were asked what they wanted to know more about, every top answer was about their own child:
- How their child’s learning is measured
64% of families want to understand how their child’s progress is measured beyond tests. - How teaching fits their child
59% want more insight into how teaching is personalised for their child. - What the feedback means
54% want to understand the feedback their child receives and how it helps them improve. - What teachers know about their child
53% want to know what teachers understand about their child’s individual strengths and needs.
One parent in the study, who also runs communications for a large school district, put it plainly: the voices that matter to her are her son’s teachers and his principal. Everything else is noise.
Why the gap exists
If parents want information about their own child, why don’t schools give it to them?
Usually it isn’t a lack of willingness. It’s the systems. In most schools, the information parents care about lives in one place (the MIS, the markbook, the attendance register), and the tools used to talk to parents live somewhere else!
To tell a parent something specific about their child, a member of staff has to look it up in one system and retype it in another.
Too many tools make this worse. The districts in the study use an average of 2.3 communication platforms at the same time, and 36% use three or more. That’s before counting the apps individual teachers adopt on their own. Every extra channel is one more place parents have to check, and one more place a message can get lost.
Closing the gap: what actually works
The answer isn’t to send more messages. It’s to connect communication to the information the school already holds about each child.
That’s how we built Schooly.
The parent app runs on the same database as the rest of the school’s systems, so when staff record something, parents can see it without anyone retyping it.
- Information about their child, not just the school
Attendance, reports and messages from their child’s teachers appear in the parent app as they’re recorded. When a student is marked absent, the parent is notified straight away. - One place to check
Schooly’s nine modules share one database, so schools can replace the mix of newsletter, WhatsApp and email with a single app. Fewer channels means fewer missed messages. - Two-way, not one-way
Parents can reply to messages directly in the app. Conversations stay professional and on record, with no personal phone numbers involved. - In the family’s own language
The parent app works in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and Thai. In the research, 52% of leaders said communicating in a family’s preferred language is something they want from a new tool. For international schools, it’s essential.
Why this matters beyond satisfaction scores
Leaders in the study see family engagement as a direct route to better outcomes:
81% believe it can improve academic performance, and 76% believe it can improve attendance.
Parents don’t want more messages from school. They want better information about their child. Schools close the 24 point gap by connecting communication to the information they already hold, not by adding another channel.
Not sure how your school’s communication looks from the parent side? The simplest first step is to ask them. If their answers point to a gap, we’re happy to show you how Schooly’s parent app works in a 30 minute demo.
Want to see the parent app in action?
30-minute demo. No credit card. No IT team needed.
Source: Project Tomorrow and ClassDojo, “The Family Engagement Disconnect”, October 2026.
