What a single communication really involves #
Take an ordinary one: Year 4 are swimming next half term, so parents need to know the dates, the kit and the cost. Before a word is sent, this all has to happen.
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Pull the Year 4 list
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Strip out the two children who have left and add the one who started on Monday
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Check which families have more than one child in the year so they do not get it twice
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Decide whether it goes to both parents at separate addresses
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Work out who is not on the parent app and needs paper or email
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Send it
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Field the replies
Including the parent who says they never got it and the parent who replies to a no-reply address.
Multiply that by a term of trips, clubs, closures, consultations, policy updates, photo days, flu jabs, uniform notices and the weekly newsletter, and you have a job that runs constantly in the background of every other job in the office.
DfE research published in April 2023 defined general administrative work to teachers as including communication, paperwork, work emails and other clerical duties, and that was the task most often named as taking up too much time, at 75 per cent.
The list is the hard part, not the letter #
A school knows who is in Year 4. What it does not reliably have, in one place, is the answer to a compound question: who in Year 4 has a sibling in Year 6, has not paid for the last trip, is entitled to free school meals, and has a parent whose app account has never been activated.
Every real communication is a version of that question, and every time it gets answered by hand, from several screens, by somebody who has done it enough times to remember the exceptions.
The DfE has already said whose job this is not #
The Workload Reduction Taskforce's initial recommendations of January 2024 list 23 administrative tasks that should not require a teacher. Item 10 is the responsibility for producing, copying, uploading and distributing bulk communications to parents and pupils, including standard letters, school policies and posts on electronic platforms.
The taskforce's test is worth borrowing whoever ends up holding the task. Does it need to be done at all? Is it administrative or clerical? Does it call for professional judgement? A surprising number of school communications fail the first test outright, and the audit usually finds two or three that nobody can remember deciding to send.
Which parts run on rules #
Runs on rules
- Building a recipient list from criteria the school can state
- Merging the fields
- Choosing the channel each family actually uses
- Sending
- Recording who received it and who did not
- Chasing the non-responders on a schedule
- Reconciling replies back against the list
All of that has a fixed trigger, fixed steps and a fixed output, every time.
Needs a person
- The wording of a first attendance letter
- Whether this family gets a standard letter or a phone call
- What to say to the parent who has just told you something difficult
Anything a parent will read as a judgement about their child or their circumstances.
The DfE's own attendance communications guidance, published on 9 June 2026 and updated on 19 August 2026, exists precisely because the wording changes the outcome. Getting the mechanical half off a person's desk is what leaves room to get the other half right.
What has to be settled first #
Parent contact details are personal data, and the pupil records they are attached to are personal data about children. The DfE's guidance on data protection in schools, updated on 9 July 2026, has sections on sharing personal data and on procuring educational technology for exactly this reason. The school stays the controller. A messaging supplier is a processor acting on the school's instructions. Settle that before anything else.
The cost of admin time calculator will put a number on what the sending and chasing costs across a year. The natural next page is trip consent and payments, which is what happens after a letter like the swimming one goes out.