🎶
There’s something strange in your school newsletters…
Something lurking in the curriculum updates…
Hiding in the parent handbook…
Who ya gonna call?
Sing it with me… Jargon Busters!
🎶
Before you get on the phone though, let’s take a look at why jargon creeps into our communication in the first place.
Nobody is sitting down to write confusing communication on purpose. Yet somehow, parents end up feeling like outsiders in their own child’s education.
That gap between good intentions and the experience families actually have is what Bolsta is on a mission to help you close.
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.
Tools and ideas to help you become a Jargon Buster
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.
What happens when jargon gets its way
Schools are in the business of human transformation. And 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 actually understands how to support their child’s learning at home.
Human-centred design suggests that a school can unintentionally exclude families through language and assumed knowledge. The language you use in those moments shapes whether a parent feels inside the story of their child’s education, or outside of it.
Every piece of school communication is a chance to build that relationship. Designing plain language into the system is one way to stop leaving that chance on the table.
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
