Fiona taps out the words with her thumbs and presses “send”. Three dots appear: Ms Wright is writing. After a couple of seconds, Ms Wright’s message pings into view. Fiona thinks about it. And then she starts thumbing away at a reply. Fiona is Toby’s mum and Ms Wright is Toby’s teacher. This conversation is the most they have said to each other during the nine months in which they have had a mutual interest in Toby’s education.

Which is odd, because the app they are using - a chat function that is part of a home-learning platform - has been in place for the entirety of those nine months. In fact, it’s been in place at the school for the past three years. But Fiona had never used it before 9.45am on 23 March 2020. And - whisper it - neither had Ms Wright. In fact, neither knew it existed until the previous week, when instructions were sent out in a hurried email.

But here they are, day one of lockdown, using that chat function to discuss which tasks little Toby should be doing on the online maths quiz platform the school has recommended for remote learning. Ms Wright thinks Toby should be doing the level 4 tasks; Fiona thinks he should be doing level 3 tasks to warm him up. They agree on a plan.

Parents and teachers partnering together on the learning of a child like this is, according to the research, a key pillar of education. All the studies point to better outcomes when a parent and the school combine to help a child progress. But life so often gets in the way, paper-based communications so often go missing en route, and you always have that group of parents who seem impervious to any school approaches.

In recent years, tech has provided a potential answer to these problems - offering comms on the run, notifications so nothing is missed, breaking down physical barriers, putting everything on a platform that looks like something every parent is used to using socially - but neither schools nor parents have ever quite had the hard push needed to make full use of it.

But now they have: you can’t get a harder push than forced remote learning. So, has tech finally been able to facilitate a new era of parent-school communication? And if it has, does this have any chance of lasting when we return to teaching everyone in a classroom?

We should start by stating that very few, if any, of the tools used in the past few months for remote learning are new. Some have added new features, but on the whole the tech has been there to connect home and school for some time.

“We have had access to a range of online learning tools for ages, but we had largely ignored them,” says Francis Peters*, a secondary school teacher in Dorset. He remembers getting Microsoft Teams, for example, and having an induction in it. But he can’t pinpoint a time when he had used it before lockdown.

So, the tech was there on 23 March, when remote learning began for most, but, as Peters says, not many teachers or parents were used to using it to communicate (there are, of course, examples of schools where it was used more regularly, though they were in the minority).

“Suddenly, we were trying to persuade parents to use chat functions and comms tools that we had barely worked out how to use ourselves,” admits Peters.

Schools had little choice but to use these tools. Trying to rely on phone calls and the post would have been like expecting a parents’ evening appointment to run on time: boldly optimistic. So, how successful was the transition? Did teachers and parents alike embrace their roles and wave in a new era of connections between home and school?

The truth is, it’s hard to tell at this point. The crisis is ongoing - most children are still not in school - and doing research and then crunching data takes time. We do, however, have some early clues.

For example, according to the early results of a survey of 4,000 teachers conducted by Dr Beng Huat See, associate professor in the School of Education at Durham University, teachers have spent approximately eight hours per week, on average, communicating with parents during lockdown.

Many would not have previously managed eight hours of conversations with parents in the whole school career of some pupils. Can that be right? Unsurprisingly, See urges a note of caution on the figures.

“That seems a lot,” she says - adding that it is possible respondents were exaggerating the amount of time. Communication may, of course, be one-way, too. Just because teachers build it, it does not mean the parents will come.

But some support for an increase in chat time comes from the usage stats for existing parental engagement platforms. Tom Harbour is chief executive of Learning with Parents, a charity that works with schools and more than 20,000 families across the UK to encourage parental involvement - particularly among disadvantaged groups. It has a number of learning resources, the most widely used of which is Maths with Parents.

Harbour reports that there was “a surge” in usage of the resources by schools already on the platform when lockdown began and a huge uptick in the number of schools signing up. “We went from working with around 85 schools to now having around 800 or 900 schools on our books,” he says.

Harbour believes this was not just a tech success but an overdue acknowledgement by schools that parent engagement was a priority. “We’ve suddenly seen the teachers sort of ‘get it’ - that parental engagement is really important, and that they should be prioritising it,” he says.

“There is always a hierarchy of things on teachers’ to-do lists: you’ve got safeguarding, you’ve got the things that you’re teaching tomorrow, and all the other things that your headteacher is badgering you about. Parental engagement is always on that list, but it’s never quite at the top.”

Are parents reciprocating, though? Is school a priority for them, too? It’s all very well that schools are signing up, but they may be (politely) screaming into a void.

Bruno Reddy, director of Maths Circle, which provides Times Tables Rock Stars and NumBots, says his data - both numerical and anecdotal - suggests that parents have been happily shouting back.

“Parents are sharing much, much more on our Twitter profile than ever before and commenting among themselves on social media,” he says. “More teachers are starting their emails with ‘a parent has been in touch to say’. More parents are saying their children are playing too much, and want help. I think we’re seeing an awakening from parents about their children’s access to devices and the internet.”

So far, so positive. And yet, Harbour sounds a note of caution: how many parents are being converted into full “school engagers”?

Parental engagement tends to come on a spectrum: at one end you have a small group who are PTA members and very involved in their child’s education; in the middle you have the majority, those who turn up when they have to or when asked to, but beyond that let the school get on with it; and then you have a small group who never engage with the school or do so very rarely. The latter tend to be labelled “hard to reach”.

Harbour fears that, in some schools, the increase in engagement may have largely been from the middle of the spectrum, and not from the hard-to-reach end.

“The schools who’ve just spontaneously come on board ... we’ve seen them have a reasonable uptake, and they might be quite content if 70 per cent of their parents are using something - but that means there is a big chunk who aren’t,” he says.

Also cautious is Rose Luckin, professor of learner-centred design at the UCL Knowledge Lab in London. She has been gathering data on how lockdown has affected the relationship between teachers, pupils and education technology companies. The research is ongoing, but has already had responses from around 2,300 people -although Luckin says that they are looking at ways to ensure that more disadvantaged families participate, and the results may change once this is achieved.

While her data supports the position that engagement with edtech tools has definitely increased, Luckin is cautious about calling it parental engagement.

“Our edtech companies are certainly reporting increased interest in their products and services, but there is no data yet about whether or not they believe this is down to parental pressure or engagement,” she says. Luckin adds that around 80 per cent of the parent respondents said that the thing that helped to engage their children most in technology-based learning was not them being involved, but feedback from teachers.

So, rather than building bridges between parents and schools, is the tech actually just enabling teachers to reach into the home and bypass the parents altogether? Possibly. But possibly not. Until we get more data - and more independent data - we just don’t know. Would zeroing in on some teacher case studies help us to see in which direction the megabytes are flowing?

Kyrome Adams is a Year 5 English teacher and computing lead at Marsden Junior School in Huddersfield. He’s not been keeping a record, but his sense is that parental engagement is definitely up.

“My inbox has been the most active it has been in a while,” he says, “so I would definitely say that parental engagement has increased. I feel like parents’ hands have been forced - because they are not teachers themselves, and they have got questions about teaching, so are getting in touch.”

The school uses an app called Seesaw, a closed social network on which parents and teachers can talk, share what they have been up to and comment on work - and he says there has been “a huge increase in parental engagement” via the tool.

“The parents have been more proactive in asking questions about where their children are in their learning. Normally, at parents’ evening, you might find they just listen to what the teacher is saying and take that at face value,” Adams says.

But is it the same old voices - those who were already engaged - who are using the site? “You always get those parents who are actively in contact with you throughout the school year,” Adams acknowledges, “but I think the situation has forced the other parents to get in contact, too. I think if there is a positive that might come from all this, it’s that it will encourage more school-to-home communication, and that is what teachers want - we want the parents to be an active participant in their child’s learning.”

Helen Pinnington, early years foundation lead at St Thomas More’s Catholic Primary School in Bedhampton, Hampshire, says the story in her EYFS setting has been similar.

“Early years teachers have always had an ongoing battle trying to engage all parents,” she says. “In a previous school, the simple things like booking an appointment for parents’ evening - sometimes I had less than five appointments booked and I would be chasing them with a clipboard at the end of a school day.”

Even before the coronavirus lockdown, tech had begun to provide a new conduit to solve the engagement issue. Three years ago, at her school, Pinnington set up Tapestry, an online journal platform that allows teachers to share photographs and videos of children’s learning with their parents and carers. During lockdown, additional features have been added, including a memo function so parents can share home-learning activities.

“We [already had] around 90 per cent of parents signed up [before lockdown],” Pinnington reveals. “Once they are signed up, they do engage fairly consistently. I think this is because the communication is set up in a similar way to other social media that feels very familiar.”

But has there been an uptick in the number of parents actively using the platform to engage since lockdown?

“We did have one parent who we had been chasing to encourage her to sign up for weeks,” Pinnington explains.

“The teacher had caught her two or three times to remind her to activate the account and, a week after lockdown, she emailed and asked to re-register, and she is finally active on the account.”

For other parents, engagement has certainly increased with the memo function, with pictures of home learning being shared and teachers able to comment on those pictures. Conversations have been started and Pinnington now describes the platform as “our communication hub”.

And it’s not just Tapestry: she says that overall there has been “a huge increase in parent engagement with educational sites and an interest in learning in general” since schools closed their gates.

“My view is that this is driven by parental anxiety,” she explains. “They are suddenly 100 per cent responsible - until now there had been that safety net of school and teachers taking the lead. Perhaps parents saw their role as more of an extension to learning at school. Now, without a doubt, they feel that pressure of being in charge of their child’s education.”

Clearly, at primary age, the parents have to be involved if engagement with the school is going to happen at all, but it is positive that so many parents in both these schools are engaging - it could easily be the case that a household could disappear from the view of the school altogether, and largely that does not seem to have happened at these schools.

But what about secondary, where the tech could easily bypass the parents rather than pull them in?

Chris Edwards is headteacher at Brighton Hill Community School in Basingstoke, Hampshire. He says he has been “overwhelmed by the tenacity of our parents and carers as they undertake the ongoing task of stepping into the shoes of our teaching team”. Tech, he says, hasn’t cut parents out - it has been an enabler to parental engagement.

“One of the weekly engagement tools is the Kahoot! [a game-based learning platform] quiz set up by the Year 7 tutor team, which allows not only their students but also their families to play along,” he explains. “We’ve seen some very competitive parents at play, but all done in a wonderful, collegiate spirit.”

He adds that Microsoft Teams has become “part and parcel of everyday remote-learning processes”, while mainstream social media such as Twitter “has proved a fantastic platform for teachers to issue challenges to students, and we always enjoy seeing the pride of parents sharing their children’s work.”

In short, he believes parents are engaging more with the school and that tech is a key part of that.

So, the tentative hints from the data echo the anecdotal evidence from the above teachers: the partial closure of schools has prompted better engagement between home and schools and tech has facilitated that.

However, as Harbour said before, what does success actually mean? If 30 per cent of your parent and carer group is still not engaging, even in these circumstances, how much progress has actually been made?

It’s a question that Maaria Khan, a key stage 2 English and maths lead at Athersley North Primary School in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, feels is key. Her school’s experience of parental engagement prior to lockdown would be typical of many.

“It has definitely been a challenge for us,” she says. “We’ve tried setting homework online, having access to things such as Times Tables Rock Stars, and found it difficult to get parents on board. I think it’s partly down to them not knowing how to use the technology and partly down to them not wanting to use it, as they don’t see it as work in the traditional sense.”

Since schools closed, she says, progress has been made, but it has not been a flood of new communications and neither has tech been the great enabler it has been for others.

“Things have changed a little,” Khan explains. “But our initial plan as a school was to use paper-based packs for home learning because it was what parents preferred, and it was easy enough to sort out.”

These packs did include log-ins for online resources including Times Tables Rock Stars, the Bedrock vocabulary programme and both the Oxford Owl and Classroom Secrets suites, but Khan says “the children weren’t engaging with the online stuff as much [as with the printed resources]”.

There has been a lot of press about this lack of digital engagement being down to families not having internet access: Office for National Statistics data suggests that 7 per cent of households don’t have an internet connection in England. But Khan says the issue is more nuanced than that - it’s about suitable hardware.

“We got in contact with parents and asked about internet connections,” she explains. “Pretty much everyone had access to the internet, but for a lot this was only through their phones - and it is difficult to set home learning that way.”

Peters agrees. He says the only way he can get some parents to communicate with his secondary school is to ring them, and even then it can take several calls before someone picks up. The idea that they may log in to an app and talk about their child’s work is, he says, slightly naive.

So, why might some schools have had success while others clearly have not? Why can’t schools hit that 100 per cent engagement figure? To think it would be otherwise would be to oversimplify the problem. Millions of pounds’ worth of research has gone into the issue of parental engagement, with few concrete answers for schools. Tech could never have been the only answer because parental engagement is more complex than simple connectivity. Some barriers are practical - parents being too busy or not having a level of education themselves that allows them to feel comfortable in engaging - while others are more worrying (such as safeguarding issues).

“Parental engagement is affected by a number of factors, such as parents having to juggle different jobs to make ends meet, lack of access to technology, and other significant challenges faced by families, and none of this is likely to have changed,” says Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders.

If parental engagement has increased despite these challenges being even more acute, it cannot be simply put down to necessity - the tech has clearly been essential for learning, but for the parents across the UK who have had to be stand-in teachers, it has also provided a crucial outreach tool. Without those tools, things would have been a lot bleaker. Yes, some parents have remained hard to reach, but many more have been more reachable because of tech.

Will that positive story of parental engagement continue when schools return to some semblance of normality? It’s a fair question: if tech can’t make it stick, then was it really the tech making it happen? That said, “stickability” - a measure of how long a person spends on a tech platform and how frequently they return - is a Silicon Valley obsession that no one has found an entirely foolproof, and ethical, answer to. Is it too much to expect schools to solve it?

“It would be nice to think that the use of remote-learning technology during the period of lockdown will have had a lasting positive impact on engagement, but we need to be realistic that many of the barriers will remain,” says Barton.

While acknowledging that, it’s worth noting how far schools have come and what great work they have done already. And Fiona - she’s a real person, by the way, though some of the names here have been changed for privacy - is certainly a cause for optimism that this work can be built upon.

“I was a bit cynical about it all at first, but the thing is, I can see it working,” she says. “I can see that my own involvement has an impact in a way I would not have really expected. And once you see that, it feels a little like letting your child down to go back to the way things were.”

Chris Parr is a freelance journalist

*Some names have been changed to protect people’s anonymity

This article originally appeared in the 26 June 2020 issue under the headline “Has tech updated your connection?”