Jargon is overwhelming. It also shapes how parents feel about their relationship with school, and not in a good way.
It’s not about the words
When a parent reads or receives communication that talks about “co-constructed learning frameworks,” or “transdisciplinary inquiry,” they’re almost certainly skim-reading.
Over time, the little messages underneath grow:
I’m not sure I belong in this conversation.
I feel overwhelmed about how to best care for my child.
I don’t know how to support my child in their education, because I don’t understand it myself.
Research into parent decision-making shows that families form lasting impressions from thin slices of interaction. One confusing or overwhelming piece of communication in the first week of school can shape the whole relationship. Those early moments are particularly important.
Jargon, ultimately, excludes.
How jargon sneaks up on us
1. Educators want their work to be properly represented
Teaching is complex, layered, intellectually demanding work. As educators, you want to share the nuance, the complexity, the hard work. The instinct to reach for precise language is understandable. It comes from caring about the work.
The problem is that precision and clarity aren’t the same thing. A term can be exactly right inside a professional community and completely opaque outside it. Donald Miller puts it plainly in Building a StoryBrand: insider language doesn’t just confuse people, it actually signals risk. The subtext a parent hears isn’t I don’t know what this means. It’s I’m not sure how this school is serving my child.
Busting jargon isn’t a rejection of the complexity underneath. It’s the harder, more generous work of translating it… of saying, this matters, and you deserve to understand why.
2. Jargon accumulates over time
Peps McCrea, in his newsletter Evidence Snacks, describes something he calls additive bias: the deeply human tendency to respond to problems by adding things.
Each addition seems reasonable at the time. But over time, across dozens of small decisions, the result is something nobody chose and nobody quite knows how to change.
Jargon works exactly this way. “Co-constructed learning frameworks” didn’t arrive in one decision. It arrived with a curriculum review, then a professional development day, then a staff member who used it in a newsletter because that was the language on the slide. Multiply that across teams, initiatives, and years, and you have a communication culture that feels normal on the inside and bewildering on the outside.
Research into parent decision-making shows that families form lasting impressions from thin slices of interaction. One confusing piece of communication in the first week of school can shape the whole relationship.
Those early moments carry disproportionate weight. Jargon, ultimately, excludes.
3. Busting jargon feels like one more thing to do
You’re not short on things to think about. Asking a busy educator to audit their language before every communication is… well, I can see your eyes glazing over from here.
This is why, over time, you want to more carefully build a jargon-free communication culture, so that the weight of the problem doesn’t rest on individuals, in the moment.
Every communication is a moment
Schools are in the business of human transformation. Transformation happens in moments:
- A child connecting the dots to understand a concept for the first time.
- A teacher who notices something nobody else noticed.
- A parent who opens an email and understands how to reinforce learning at home.
The language you use in these moments can shape whether a parent feels inside the story of their child’s education, or outside of it.
When the experience of school is designed intentionally (not left to chance) small things like language choice become the building blocks of a great relationship with ‘school’.
What parents need
As educators, it’s hard to find clarity in your language sometimes. But parents don’t need jargon to know this.
They need:
- To feel informed without feeling overwhelmed
- To understand what their child is experiencing, in plain terms
- To feel that the school is talking with them, not at them
- To trust that when something matters, the school will tell them clearly
- To understand how their child is making progress, and what they need to know in order to support them
When you bust jargon, it’s not dumbing anything down. It’s actually doing the harder, more generous work of meeting parents where they are.
Ready to bust some jargon?
Jargon Buster
Jargon Buster is a small, free, and admittedly slightly silly tool I made for teachers and communicators. You paste in some written communication, it finds the jargon, explains why each term is a problem, and suggests a plain-language alternative.
The hover glossary
This is a bespoke feature we’ve been building into a website at the moment. When a parent encounters a term they might not recognise like a pedagogical approach, a pastoral structure, or a program name, they can hover over it and get a plain-language explanation without leaving the page.
Jargon Buster may be a bit of fun, but it reflects something we care about deeply: the idea that every school communication is a chance to build a healthier, more productive relationship between family and school.
Sources and further reading
McCrea, P. (2025, February 5). Ruthless simplicity. Evidence Snacks.snacks.pepsmccrea.com/p/ruthless-simplicity
Miller, D. (2017). Building a StoryBrand. HarperCollins Leadership.
On human-centred design and language accessibility: Interaction Design Foundation, Human-Centred Design. interaction-design.org/literature/topics/human-centered-design
