Dissatisfied mums and dads are being shut out of information portals and going without crucial communications because schools’ policies and processes aren’t designed to cater to separated families, a pioneering study has concluded.

Spurred on by her own dislocating experience in the system, Renee Desmarchelier from the University of Southern Queensland led the project, unearthing a string of obstacles that are hindering separated parents’ engagement in their children’s schooling.

She tells EducationHQ it was concerning to find parents’ satisfaction with the home-school relationship came down to the health of their own co-parenting union and how well they were communicating with their ex-partner.

“So, it wasn’t necessarily anything the schools were doing, it was whether they had an amicable co-parent relationship and were communicating [amongst] themselves.

“Which is a problem in itself, because it was relying on the parents to get along to share the information, which we know is often not the case.”

Blunt management systems not fit-for-purpose

A key issue is that student management systems do not allow for the nuanced needs of separated families, leaving some out in the cold, Desmarchelier says.

The researcher knows how this can play out first-hand. When student report cards went online for the first time in Queensland, she says she never received the log-in details as promised.

“My ex-partner was the person who lived in the school catchment area, so he was the primary parent in the system. So, when I emailed the school, they said, ‘oh no, you will need to get the log-in details off [him]’,” she recalls.

“I thought, ‘hang on a minute, I've got just as much right to that information’ … both parents have rights to that information.”

After some digging with the help of the school, Demarchelier discovered that if you report your child lives with both parents, the management system assumes you all live together and offers up just one set of communication.

The concept of visiblity – or rather the lack thereof – was woven throughout parents’ responses in the study. 

As one father expressed: 

“I guess my partner at the time had, unbeknownst to me, actually contacted the school, changed the point of contact, and changed payments . . . Then, when I contacted the school and said that I either wasn’t receiving any information or that all the notices suddenly weren’t coming to me, they said, ‘Oh, we’re not going to get involved’. And so, I was left completely out of it. The school wasn’t prepared to discuss any matters, unless it was jointly, or through something pre-arranged." 

The ‘primary parent’ problem

Schools’ in-built assumptions about the family unit emerged as a key issue in the research.

“We heard a lot about this need for a primary parent in most student management systems as particularly problematic...

“And it often meant the mothers were prioritised. We had some fathers reporting to us that the school told them they weren’t allowed to be the primary parent in the system because that had to be the mother,” Desmarchelier flags.

Another parent interviewed said conflict had erupted when only one set of information was provided at a classroom open day.

“That led to things that neither parent really wanted to experience in the classroom, in front of the teacher, in front of the other parents…” the researcher says.

“Just thinking through the implications of even small interactions like that can be really important. So, how are you going to effectively communicate with both parents?”

Make no assumptions

Schools ought to also remain cognisant of perhaps not knowing everything about the dynamic at play within a separated family, Desmarchelier adds.

“We saw lots of incidences where the parent filling out [our] survey was reporting family and domestic violence, but there were no court orders involved in that.

“I think schools need to be really conscious of the fact that they are not necessarily going to be aware where that has taken place in families. It’s not necessarily something that’s going to be disclosed to them.

“So saying to parents, ‘you two just need to sort it out yourselves’, can be particularly damaging for people in those sorts of situations – and parents will go without the information rather than expose themselves to those sorts of dangers again.”

Avoid deficit language 

It's important to consider the language used to describe separated families too, the researcher argues.

“We even had an incident where a mum had gone to a potential new school for an interview with the principal, and the principal talked about all these ‘terrible broken families that had moved into the area’.

“She just looked at her and said, ‘I don’t think this is a school for us, thank you very much’.

“That language where you’re framing diverse family structures as deficit can be quite damaging to parents’ confidence as well.”

‘We need to get this experience on record’ 

The study plugs a clear gap in the research literature focused on parent engagement with schools.

“Nowhere is there anything around what that experience is for separated parents, and that was really a prompt for me to go, ‘well, actually we need to get this experience on record’, because it hasn’ t really been recorded before,” Desmarchelier says.

The charge now is to look at how schools might more inclusively communicate with all families – regardless of how they might deviate from the nuclear norm, the academic shares.

“I really think we need to look at the way we manage student information and family information.

“We started in this separated parent space, but we want to start looking at diverse family structures more broadly…”