28: Who Counts as Internal?
A provocation, not a framework.
Where We Are
Whenever I talk about “internal communications” in schools, people outside of K-12 usually look at me like I’m describing corporate plumbing. Necessary, but dry, hidden, and mostly ignored.
But last week, at an informal gathering, the plumbing burst.
What started as a casual catch-up with parents from a local international school quickly became a debate about who our schools actually serve. That’s when one of them, a parent whose children have been at the school for over five years, said:
“We feel like internal stakeholders. But the school often communicates with us like we’re strangers standing outside the gates.”
He wasn’t trying to be dramatic. His family has lived the school’s history. They know the campus shortcuts, the leadership transitions, the unwritten cultural codes.
Yet, he explained, every official update, email, and town hall feels off. The tone is polished, sterile, and weirdly distant. The weekly bulletin reads like a press release. There’s a gap between what the school says publicly and what families actually experience inside it.
It left me with a question I’ve been chewing on ever since:
If the very families who carry our school’s culture feel like external spectators, who actually counts as “internal” in a school?
The Binary Is the Bottleneck
Educator colleagues answer that question with a tidy line. Staff are inside. Everyone else is outside. Parents get the “external” label, students get a vague middle position, and the comms strategy gets built around the boundary.
The line is doing real work. It tells you who gets the all-staff email, who gets the parent newsletter, who gets the polished press release, who gets the unfiltered WhatsApp channel. It tells you what tone to use and how honest to be. It tells you, subtly, who the school trusts.
But the line has stopped holding.
Think about it: the people on the “external” side of the line have been inside the building for years. They know your staff turnover patterns. They know which teachers parents talk to and which ones they don’t. They know the difference between the version of your school that appears in the prospectus and the version that shows up on a Tuesday afternoon. They are not strangers. They are not customers. They are definitely not the public.
They are people the school keeps treating as outsiders, despite all available evidence.
The Uncomfortable Part
Here’s what I think gets lost in the binary.
The internal/external line isn’t really about who knows the school. It’s about who gets a say.
The label has a side effect, even when nobody intends it: it shapes decisions about who's in the loop, whose voice counts, and which version of the story gets told. Schools end up keeping the comfortable distance of a service provider while still expecting the loyalty of a community.
Those two things are hard to hold at the same time.
Most of us have sat in a morning-coffee meeting framed as “conversation” that was actually a slideshow. Most of us have sent a thoughtful email about belonging and partnership, then watched the next leadership decision get made without families in the loop. The warmth is in the message. The control is in the room. The families notice.
None of this is malicious. It’s structural. Schools are pulled toward warmth in their public voice and toward control in their actual practice, and the people writing the comms are usually caught in the middle. But the gap is real, and families are reading it.
A Question to Carry With You
Look at one piece of communication your school sent to families this month. Ask yourself: was it written for someone inside the system, or someone outside it?
Sit with it for a while. Then hit reply and tell me where you land on this.
Systematically yours,
About the Author:
G (short for Gitane) is co-founder and Chief Creative Officer at EKG Collective, helping international schools turn communication complexity into systematic clarity. Learn more at ekgcollective.com.