Partnering with parents: Enabling better outcomes

In her January 2026 Big Think webinar, Katharine explained how international schools can nurture the relationship and information flow between parents and educators to help reduce students' exam stress. In this article, she provides clear and consise guidance to support your parent partnerships.

Parental involvement is key

Education is a process and parents always have an impact on how that process rolls forward. Sometimes parents can be over-involved, checking up on or questioning every detail; sometimes they are under-involved and hard to reach; sometimes they are counter-involved, challenging school policies or supporting unconstructive behaviours. Whatever the size or shape of parental involvement, there’s always an impact.

Communication with parents is key to enabling good outcomes. The principles of timely, engaging, clear and concise communication are well-established in schools but the question of what to communicate is trickier.

What do parents need to know? What do parents need to understand?

Decisions about communication are often driven by what parents need to know: timelines, policies, progress reports - there’s no doubt that parents need to know these things. It’s so easy to answer the question of what do parents need to know that we sometimes don’t pause to ask what they need to understand.

Let’s imagine asking this now: what do you wish parents understood better about education? Whenever I ask this question at a conference or training event, familiar themes always crop up: I wish parents understood that you can’t guarantee an outcome; if only parents understood that too much pressure makes it harder for a child to do well; parents often don’t understand that disengagement doesn’t always mean a child is lazy or doesn’t care.

Why don’t parents understand the process of education?

Why don’t some parents understand these things? It’s often because there are gaps or distortions in the information flow. Gaps arise because teenagers usually don’t tell their parents much about their experiences. Many teenagers find it difficult to talk to their parents about school: sometimes they’re too tired at the end of a long day, sometimes the conversations are just too difficult, too fraught and too close to the power-keg of maybe you think I’m not doing well enough. Distortions arise because parents can remember their own time at school; they fill in the gaps with their own assumptions about what school is like, even though the adolescent school experience has changed dramatically over the last 30 years.

Parents need to understand the process if they’re to support effectively

Effective communication goes beyond handing over information about what is happening at school; effective communication helps parents understand how to help. Central to this is helping parents see what their child might be experiencing: it’s worth asking which parts of the process are most likely to be invisible to parents. Which aspects are teenagers least likely to talk about at home? I’m worried I might disappoint you; I’m worried my grades won’t be good enough - is it straightforward for a teenager to initiate a conversation about this?

Re-thinking the messaging

The pathway to effective communication involves asking four questions: What do parents most need to understand? What parts of the teenage experience are least likely to be visible? These two questions will help you set the priorities for your communication plan. Then it’s worth asking the following two questions next: How can we express these ideas in short tag-lines that are easy to remember? How can we make sure that parents hear these messages often enough for them to sink in?

Shifting the mindset

Different schools operate in different cultural contexts; sometimes there can be deeply embedded cultural beliefs which make it harder for parents to hear certain messages. If this is the case, then the first thing to remember is that it’s worth believing in the power of repetition: Hard work needs energy and stamina; teenagers find it easier to sustain this energy if their parents help them rest and find balance. If a message is repeated often enough, it will gradually become sufficiently familiar to begin to gain traction.

But there’s one more strategy that helps shift mindsets: effective communication aims to broaden a parent’s understanding rather than pull against their values. If, for example, the parents at your school are focused on outcomes because they value hard work and achievement, then their focus on outcomes has its own validity. Believing that outcomes matter isn’t problematic; problems start to arise if parents only focus on outcomes. We all want great outcomes but we know that to get there, teenagers need validation and balance - that’s the sort of message which uses the parents’ beliefs as a starting point and then opens up the thinking. It builds on a recognised value and enables a better understanding of how to get there.

Key takeaways

If you’d like to read more about practical suggestions for how parents can support their children, you’ll find plenty of these in The Parent’s Guide to Exam Stress. There’s guidance there about how parents can facilitate constructive conversations about school and how they can help with the daily rhythm of working and resting; there are top tips for motivation and practical ways to reduce problematic levels of exam stress. But I’d encourage you to use the quality of your own professional expertise as your starting point: you know what it’s like for the students in your care, you know what helps them and what holds them back. What do parents need to understand better in your context? If you centre discussions around this question, it can be transformative in shaping the priorities and strategies for effective communication.

Further reading

To learn more about how to engage parents to build trust and enable effective communication, watch Katharine Radice's Big Think webinar and download the slide deck.