Lost in Translation: The Communication Divide

Years in education, and most educators across countries, systems, programs, and roles are still puzzled by something that should not be puzzling at all. Schools exist to educate young people and yet the adults tasked with sustaining that mission often behave as if they are working at cross-purposes.

The conflict between academic and business imperatives is so familiar that we barely question it anymore. We treat it as inevitable. Natural. Even healthy. But the longer we work in schools, the less sense that assumption should make to us.

The Divide

If you work in a school, you’ve seen the examples. In the staffroom, a handful of weary educators complain about “the bean counters” who are "parsimonious” and “don’t understand learning,” while those same finance teams scramble to keep the institution financially viable. Meanwhile, in the back office, the finance team is on its toes, exhausted by the teaching staff request, while the educators are spending every day at the chalk face, trying to produce the outcomes the school promises families.

We joke about it. We normalise it. But underneath the humour sits something far more corrosive: distrust.

Between Coherence & Incoherence

Educators are not naïve about money. They manage family budgets, mortgages, loans, investments, and financial uncertainty. Likewise, finance professionals are well aware about this situation too. They know that a school’s reputation, enrollment, and long-term sustainability depend entirely on what happens in classrooms. Academic quality is the business model.

So why do these two groups, who ultimately depend on each other, so often talk past one another?

Let’s Get Talking

The answer one can suspect lies in the communication or simply, language. Too often, academic and finance leaders aren’t actually disagreeing, they’re failing to translate. Instead of operating as partners pursuing shared outcomes, they default to tribal positions, each using frameworks and terminology that simply don’t land on the other side.

We’ve witnessed academic leaders justify additional staffing or new resources by appealing to pedagogy and educational philosophy ideas deeply meaningful to educators, but often abstract to finance teams. We’ve seen finance managers listen carefully, nod, and then reject proposals without articulating their reasoning in ways educators can respect or engage with.

What would happen if we treated this not as a budget problem, but as a communication failure?

A Case Study

Many years ago, a certain Head modelled a different approach during a budget planning meeting at a boarding school in Australia. A new board member questioned a long-standing budget item: the tradition of welcoming staff to eat lunch with boarders at no cost. Why, he asked, should the school pay for “free staff lunches”?

The Head replied calmly that it wasn’t free lunch at all. “Those costs”, he explained, “belong under Professional Development and Pastoral Care.” When the board member said he didn’t understand, the Head explained: “You see, when a teacher enters the dining hall and sits with a colleague, they usually talk about school matters or valuable professional learning. When they sit with students, they tend to talk about student matters and pastoral care in action. I can’t give you neat metrics or hard data,” he concluded, “but I’m confident that the return on investment is real. Do you trust me?”

The discussion ended there.

Of course, that explanation wouldn’t have satisfied an external auditor but it worked for insiders who understood school culture. Most importantly, it translated an educational practice into a business concept the board could grasp.

Conclusion

Can we wonder what might change if this became the norm rather than the exception. What if educators routinely explained how academic investments reduce long-term costs, improve retention, strengthen culture, and protect the brand? What if department leaders framed requests in terms of efficiency, sustainability, and return on investment without abandoning their educational values?

Equally, what if finance teams were more explicit about constraints, trade-offs, and strategic priorities, using language that invited collaboration rather than resistance?

We are educators and we believe that schools work best when trust replaces suspicion and translation replaces tribalism. And to those who believe that the divide is inevitable, it is not.