Led by Dr Carolyn Wade and Natalie Thackwell from Griffith University, the research canvasses the experiences of 14 school principals from Queensland and NSW, finding leaders are grappling with a new era of parent engagement that is marked by heightened scrutiny, growing accountability expectations, and severely escalating reputational risk.
This is unfolding in often volatile and emotionally charged online spaces – spaces where screenshots are circulated, video footage is shared, and spiraling WhatsApp chat groups quickly morph into campaigns that are often designed to not only apply pressure, but to directly attack the reputation of school leaders.
Wade says this is by no means a peripheral phenomenon that’s playing out.
“The school leaders were describing how even the possibility of something being shared online was actually changing the way they did their work.
“So, they were thinking more carefully about what they were putting in writing, they were documenting interactions, they were anticipating complaints, but also considering how a decision might be represented by a different audience outside of the school,” she tells EducationHQ.
What might have started as a small-scale complaint or disagreement can quickly snowball when it is made public across online platforms, chat groups and community pages on social media, the researcher flags.
The conversations that ensue typically involve people that have little or no knowledge of the original circumstance either, Wade adds.
“One of our leaders described parents, and this was literally her quote, ‘rallying the troops online’.
“And they literally mounted a protest – it was during COVID and the school leader was implementing government-enforced restrictions, and a few parents disagreed with them.
“A Facebook group post encouraged other parents to turn up at the school gate, literally rallying the troops to protest and march onto the school grounds.
“I know it’s wild, but this is literally what we’re talking about.”
Dr Carolyn Wade says digital platforms haven’t just made parent complaints louder. “They have really changed the audience, and they’ve changed the speed and the power dynamics of the complaint process itself.”
Leaders in the study portrayed social media arenas as emotionally volatile spaces where information, gossip, and moral judgment became completely blurred.
One recalled being publicly called out as ‘the worst principal in the world, and on Google reviews’, while for others the scrutiny turned visual.
“Throughout last year there would’ve been 50 or 60 TikToks on me,” one principal reported.
She recalled the time a parent used their phone to film their interaction:
‘“Can you just start that again, I want to video it?” … my hands were shaking,’” she said.
Another principal explained that some parents turned to social media to air their grievances or to push a certain agenda because they knew this would put pressure on the school to respond.
“So, a parent is no longer limited to just disagreeing with the principal. They can invite an audience into that disagreement online. They can seek validation. They can recruit others to their interpretation of events, which increases the visibility of a complaint very quickly,” Wade says.
The study found that complex educational decisions could quickly be reduced to a simple, moral judgment in the online world.
“So, ‘the school doesn’t care’, ‘the principal isn’t listening’, ‘my child hasn’t been treated fairly’,” Wade shares.
“But the difficulty for school leaders is that they can’t participate in these public conversations on equal terms … these two parties, they don’t necessarily have the same capacity to speak.
“Parents can make the issue public, but school leaders often have to keep the explanations private. And that creates enormous pressure.”
This situation compounds the workload for principals: not only are they responding to the initial concern and managing the relationship with the parent in question – while also protecting confidentiality and often supporting staff in the process – now they must also monitor the reputational risk involved and “try to prevent an online narrative from escalating, probably all at the same time”, Wade says.
“Digital platforms haven’t just made complaints louder. They’ve really changed the audience, and they’ve changed the speed and the power dynamics of the complaint process itself.”
For Thackwell, one of the most surprising things to emerge from principals’ accounts was the extent to which they altered their own behaviour just in anticipation of what parents might do online.
“The opening line of our article is about one principal deliberately trying to ‘beat the bad news home’, where if something happened at school, she wanted the parents to hear from her before a different version of that appeared online.
“And that really stayed with us because the communication then was not just about informing the parents, or engaging the parents, as our leaders are told to do – it had become anticipatory.”
The PhD candidate recalls one school leader explaining how she was ‘incredibly careful’ when composing emails.
“She said, ‘you just don’t know what they’re going to do with it’,” Thackwell notes.
The mere possibility of online repercussions was enough to change how principals operated in their daily interactions with parents, she adds.
“Whether it was an email that could have been screenshot, or maybe a decision publicly reframed, or a complaint amplified, that was enough for them to change the way that they communicated, the way that they documented and made decisions in relation to their role.”
Researcher Natalie Thackwell says principals in the study were anticipating online repercussions and this dramatically altered their interactions with parents.
Documentation for school leaders in this space is no longer simply administrative, the researchers say, but rather a vigilant protective mechanism that has become critical.
Indeed, routine record-keeping was described by several participants as ‘a pragmatic necessity rather than a moral choice’.
“I keep a log of every parent contact now. Not because I want to, but because I can’t afford not to,” one lamented.
Others shared how their communication had been restructured to ensure everything could be traced.
“Once we’d been through that complaint, I started copying in my AP to every reply. It’s about having a record, not about the conversation anymore,” one principal reported.
Another described how their school’s communication system had turned into a comprehensive archive, with colour coded folders spanning behaviour, contact, complaints and compliments.
“Sometimes you just want to talk, but it’s safer to write. Talking feels risky now,” the school leader said.
According to Wade and Thackwell, this represents a fundamental shift in how parental engagement operates.
“Communication should be relational. It should be open, it should be based on trust, but that’s why we've developed this idea of ‘care by paper’, because all of our participants care deeply about the families, and they genuinely wanted to maintain relationships, but they increasingly felt like they had to make their care visible and dispensable,” Wade says.
Of course, there are huge productivity costs involved here.
“Every interaction that has to be documented, every email that’s carefully drafted, every conversation, every anticipation of a future complaint, that takes time, and that’s time that school leaders aren’t spending on teaching and learning,” Wade says.
“They aren’t spending it supporting their staff, or being in classrooms, or actually leading schools.
“So what we’ve noticed is this protective work has actually just become additional work – it’s got a double cost for principals.”
This is the first of two articles detailing Wade and Thackwell's research on the changing nature of school leadership and parent engagement.
