Digital platforms are often seen as given and established parts of educational systems, also in critical research questioning their impact (Nichol & Garcia, 2022). If we instead consider that frictions and resistance are integrally part of their process of becoming (Bowker & Star, 2000; Bates, 2019), new research possibilities open up for investigating counter-positions and unexpected effects of platformisation in education. In this paper, we explore how official platforms for home–school communication met resistance from parents and caretakers in Sweden. The paper will analyse two empirical examples that demonstrate two different positions with regards to parent resistance – and forms of enacting frictions – vis-à-vis the platform-based school. First, based on analyses of media reporting, we discuss an initiative of programming-savvy parents in Stockholm who created an independent, open-source home–school communication app as a response to frustrations with the complexity and information exchange deficiencies of the formal parent communication platform (Skolplattform) issued to schools from a municipal level. While the parent initiative exposed a controversy about the citizen perspective on the platform issue, the municipal school organisation responded with a police report of a data breach by parent software developers that received international attention (Burgess, 2021). Second, based on free-text responses from a survey of more than 700 Swedish teachers conducted in the Nordic SOS project (sosproject.dtu.dk), we analyse how parents have been regularly excluded from platforms despite formal ambitions that they should be able to take part in their children's schooling (Swedish Education Act, 2010), but also explore how alternative ways to grant parents access are realised by teachers or ‘shadow IT’. Through both examples we illustrate how attending to tensions and frictions makes visible the sociomaterial ‘shadow infrastructure of care’ that forms part of digitised welfare sectors today (e.g. Power et al., 2022), also in education (Zakharova & Jarke, 2022), where it replaces or complements official platforms that were supposed to constitute the home–school communication infrastructure. Shadow infrastructures therefore include the reparative work that both shadow IT and social agents do to fulfill ‘democratic purposes’ or rather the ‘coerced digital participation’ (Barassi, 2019) of welfare platformisation. Importantly, our study shows the extent to which processes of platformisation depend on such sociomaterial shadow infrastructures that can cover up or compensate for frictions around accessibility and participation, which in turn raises concerns about the implications of distributing core welfare services to permanent but non-resilient shadow infrastructures.

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