Led by Carolyn Wade, lecturer and research fellow at Griffith University, the study drew on 12 interviews with Queensland school leaders to unveil the ‘profound emotional and moral injury’ they endure at the hands of an increasingly vocal and conflict-happy parent body.  

With more than a decade in school leadership herself, Wade says she wanted to explore how parent engagement in schools can be a double-edged sword.

“While strong parent engagement relates to a range of positive outcomes, I had seen how engagement could just as easily become a source of stress and conflict and potentially professional exhaustion for school leaders.

“But the assumption that parent engagement is inherently good is rarely questioned and policies are built around maximising parental involvement – yet little attention is given to how this engagement is experienced by those who are expected to lead it, and navigate it and manage it,” she told EducationHQ.

Ethical dilemmas

Wade says principals in the study reported feeling caught between competing demands from parents, policy directives and the practical realities of running a school.

One of the most striking findings was the profound moral and ethical quandaries that school leaders faced with parents.

“[Participants] found themselves in situations where they had to decide between making exceptions for individual students, often at the insistence of vocal parents, or maintaining policies that ensured fairness across the school community,” Wade explains.

This tension was especially fraught in high SES school communities, where parents’ expectations of ‘personalised treatment’ were tied to a consumer-driven view of their child’s schooling, the expert notes.

Broken boundaries

Professional boundaries were also regularly tested by parents, Wade flags.

“So many school leaders reported feeling pressure to be constantly available to parents – responding to late night emails, engaging in conflict resolutions, far beyond reasonable work hours, and managing hostility without clear systemic support.”

The blurring of work/life realms left leaders feeling ‘emotionally depleted’ and ‘professionally vulnerable’, Wade adds.

But the challenges didn’t end there for Wade’s subjects.

Systemic constraints, when combined with parent pressure, were also a great source of ‘ethical stress’ for school leaders, the study revealed.

“Leaders encountered scenarios where they knew what was best for a student but were constrained by policy, funding limitations, or legal obligations.

“And this created a sense of ethical stress, where leaders were forced to navigate conflicts between their professional judgment and bureaucratic mandates,” Wade shares.

In a number of cases, for example, school leaders reported that parents leveraged legal complaints to push them into making policy exemptions for their children.

“One principal recalls an incident where a parent threatened to sue because their child wasn’t receiving the level of academic accommodations that they wanted, even though the school was following both departmental and national guidelines,” Wade says.

“But this fear of legal repercussions meant that the leader had to really carefully navigate the situation, balancing fairness to the broader school community, but also without risking reputational damage.”

The leader in question described the situation as akin to “walking a tightrope every say, knowing that no matter what decision I make, someone will be unhappy”.

A training blindspot 

Wade was shocked to discover that not one of her participants had received training in how to best navigate parent engagement. She’s now calling for change on this front.

“And yet they were describing it taking up the most amount of their time in their working week,” she laments.

“If this is one of the most complex aspects of leadership, it needs to be explicitly taught with possibly training in conflict resolution or emotional resilience or even boundary setting.”

What’s often not acknowledged is how the small, incremental build up of stressful interactions and situations can wear down the morale of school leaders over time, Wade warns.

“It’s every email, it’s every demand, it’s every confrontation, it all is adding up. So that notion, ‘it’s like a death by a thousand cuts’, really speaks to these school leaders feeling like they have little control over both their professional decision-making and the moral and ethical decisions that they are making daily.”

As one principal put it:

“It’s just constant. Every day there’s another issue, another complaint, another demand. And it’s not just one parent; it’s multiple parents all with different expectations and agendas. It’s exhausting emotionally and physically. It feels like death by a thousand cuts.”

Cancel culture taking hold

The rise of cancel culture is really feeding the entire scene, Wade argues.

“I think a broader cultural shift towards public accountability and instant judgement has also shaped parent expectations.

“And cancel culture plays a key role in how disagreements, not just within society, but within schools, are unfolding.”

Now when parents are dissatisfied with an aspect of their child’s school, they are more likely to favour a public airing of their concerns, be that via social media, online petitions or even media outlets, where they demand immediate action, Wade notes.

“Instead of calling up and making an appointment and seeking to understand how and why something has played out in a school context, the parents, in regards to this study, are turning to public shaming or pressure tactics to force change.”

This is deeply troubling, the researcher says.

“It really worries me that there is no room for error in education anymore.

“And in this climate, parents feel empowered to challenge authority instantly, expect immediate resolution, often without regard for due process or the broader school policy.”