School admin is an unpaid, time-consuming job, quietly eating away at the hours of already stretched parents. From WhatsApp messages and last-minute emails to newsletters buried in walls of text, keeping up is exhausting. And while in theory, this load should be shared, in reality, it’s disproportionately carried by mums.
In our survey, 93% of mums reported that they handle school admin alone. 94% of parents have forgotten a school event at some point, but when school admin becomes a full-time mental task, the effects ripple beyond the home. Many parents also reported spending 2-4 hours per week on kid admin.
Why This Matters: The Cost of Time
Time isn’t free: The Independent estimated the value of a person’s time at £17 an hour (source). If you add up the hours spent tracking school emails, responding to messages, and making sure everything is sorted, that’s thousands of pounds in unpaid labour every year for every family.
Yet, schools still communicate as if one parent is home full-time, ready to sift through messages and extract what matters. The reality? Most parents work, balancing careers, households and childcare without a support system. And the formatting of these newsletters doesn’t help. Sometimes they’re neatly structured, but other times they resemble spaghetti thrown at a wall, leaving parents squinting at paragraphs to find the relevant information for them.
It’s a tricky balance: schools complain that parents don’t read their emails, while parents complain that schools send too many. And yet, somehow, they also complain that they’re not receiving enough communication. Schools are stuck trying to find the middle ground, but no matter what they do, someone is always unhappy.
To make matters worse, many schools use different systems to communicate. Some send updates via email, others rely on apps, and some use online portals that require parents to log in. The result? Parents never quite know where to look, and although there’s usually an email buried somewhere in their inbox telling them where, it’s just another message lost in the flood.
The Emotional, Career and Productivity Toll of Unpaid Mental Load
Handling school admin isn’t just another task: it’s mental and emotional labour. It’s the weight of remembering, checking and keeping everything running smoothly. And this has consequences:
- Emotional load: The pressure of constantly “keeping track” adds stress and guilt when you occasionally drop the ball and miss something.
- Reduced productivity: Research from Oxford University found that happier workers are 13% more productive (source). Reducing this burden doesn’t just help parents, it helps workplaces, too.
- Workplace bias: Women who request flexibility are often perceived as less committed due to the expectation that they are the default caregiver. This bias results in fewer career-advancing opportunities, such as travel and high-profile projects.
- Career impact: This bias, combined with the unequal burden of unpaid domestic admin, carried by 93% of women according to our survey, directly contributes to workplace inequality and career stagnation. The broader imbalance is stark: 70% of male partners do not engage in any daily domestic responsibilities (source), leaving women to manage both work and home, often at the cost of their own career progression.
Why We Need Tech to Fix This Imbalance
The solution isn’t just “get more organised” or “ask your partner to help.” The real solution is smarter systems that reduce the burden entirely.
That’s why I built Kiki: to automate and personalise school admin, so it’s not one person’s full-time (unpaid) job. Kiki will:
- Sync all communications, regardless where they come from into a single, unified inbox.
- Extract key dates & relevant summarises from emails and their attachments.
- Sync events to your preferred calendar with one tap.
It’s not just about making life easier. It’s about levelling the playing field so that school admin doesn’t automatically become “Mum’s job.”
What do you think? How much time do you spend on school admin each week?
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