What the Message Home Actually Says (and What It Teaches)

Imagine two messages arriving home on the same Tuesday, about the same eight-year-old and the same moment in the lunch queue.

The first reads: “Unfortunately Leo was involved in an incident at lunchtime and has lost his Golden Time on Friday. Please speak to him about his behaviour.”

The second reads: “At lunch today Leo pushed in front of a younger child, who ended up in tears. We talked it through, and Leo has an idea for putting it right tomorrow. You could ask him what it is, and let him tell you the story in his own words first.”

Both are honest. Now picture the kitchen that evening. After the first, a parent has a verdict and a sanction, and the obvious next step is a second telling-off. After the second, they know what happened, know school has dealt with it, and have a question that treats Leo as someone who can fix things.

I recently wrote about why the way parents get involved matters more than how much. This piece looks at our side: what the messages schools send home actually say, and what they might teach the child who stands between the two.

What a single sentence can do

Some of the clearest evidence comes from two American experiments. In a randomised trial by Matthew Kraft and Shaun Dougherty (2013), sixth and ninth graders at a summer school who were randomly assigned a daily phone call home and a message from their teachers had 40% higher odds of completing homework, needed redirecting 25% less often, and participated 15% more. It was a small study, of roughly 140 students.

The second study goes further. Kraft and Todd Rogers (2015) worked with a summer programme for high school students retaking courses they had failed. Each week teachers wrote one-sentence messages about every student, and parents were randomly assigned to receive a positive version (what their child was doing well), an improvement version (what their child needed to work on), or nothing. Across both types of message, the proportion of students who failed to earn course credit fell from 15.8% to 9.3%, mostly because fewer students dropped out.

What interests me is how it seems to have worked. The messages did not noticeably change how often families talked about school. They changed what those conversations were about. When the researchers coded the messages, just over 84% of improvement messages were actionable, naming something specific to start, stop or continue, compared with 8.5% of the positive ones.

Before anyone rewrites the newsletter

It would be easy to read this as “send problems, not praise”. The authors say they don’t. Improvement messages produced the larger effect, roughly 9 percentage points against 4.5, but the study couldn’t statistically tell the two apart. Kraft and Rogers suggest teachers include both, with something specific a family can act on.

They also report two counterintuitive results. Students whose parents received messages rated their own performance lower than the control group, despite doing better, and teachers reported weaker relationships with them. One explanation the authors offer is that families may read any personal message from school as a sign of trouble, because that is usually when such messages arrive.

These were American teenagers in summer programmes, a long way from a Year 2 classroom in Rio, and passing a course tells us nothing directly about character. I read the studies as good evidence that a message’s content shapes the conversation it starts. They are not a recipe.

What parents can’t see

Specific information may help because parents often have an incomplete picture. In a field experiment by Peter Bergman (2021), parents who received fortnightly information about missed assignments had started out overestimating their children’s effort. The information reduced that bias and improved achievement.

In England, the Education Endowment Foundation’s Texting Parents trial texted parents of more than 15,000 secondary pupils about tests, homework and what their children were learning. The evaluation by Sarah Miller and colleagues (2016) found about one month of extra progress in maths and lower absenteeism, an English gain that could not be relied on because of missing data, and no evidence of an effect on science. Small, cheap and mixed seems fair.

Framing turns up again in a later EEF evaluation of attendance texts, BITUP. Parents found “days missed” clearer than a percentage and valued specific, personalised information over general reminders, though the effect on attendance was small. The EEF’s Working with Parents to Support Children’s Learning adds a point about tone: a letter about absence should build parents’ sense that they can help rather than blame them.

What the child hears

What I care about is harder to count than homework or attendance. Children rarely read the messages we send about them, but they nearly always hear the echo. The message decides what the conversation at home will be about, and that conversation tells a child what the adults in both places think matters, and who they think the child is.

Go back to Leo. The likeliest lesson from the first message is that he was caught and punished, then punished again. I’ve written about how good behaviour driven by guilt can look like character from the outside while feeling like pressure from the inside, and a message that hands parents nothing but disapproval seems likely to push in that direction. The second message gives Leo a different part to play: someone who got something wrong and can put it right. That follows the same order as the questions I ask after a behaviour incident. If home uses the same language, he hears one account of who he can be, not two verdicts.

Good news works the same way. “Leo had a great week!” leaves a parent little to say beyond “well done”. “Leo noticed a new boy on his own at break and asked him to join the game” gives a parent something to ask about, and it describes an action instead of attaching a label, as I argued in what praise quietly teaches.

This part is my own inference. None of these studies measured character. It sits close to my doctoral research on children’s self-endorsed motivation, which is still under way and has no findings to offer yet.

Questions to put to our own messages

I don’t think the answer is a template; templates are how we end up with “Please speak to him about his behaviour”. These are the questions I’d ask of a message before it goes:

  • Does it say what actually happened, or only how we feel about it?
  • Is there one thing a parent could ask or do tonight?
  • Does it tell the family what school has already done, so they don’t feel they have to deliver a second sanction?
  • Does it leave room for the child’s own account?
  • If it’s good news, is it specific enough to start a conversation?
  • Will a parent finish reading it feeling able to help, or simply blamed?

Every message about a child eventually reaches that child, second-hand, in a parent’s voice. I’d like us to read each one once more as Leo will hear it. What would we want him to take from it about himself?

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