Shout about your good news

Turn your fortunes around with the right marketing tools. Fiona Leney reports

If talk of “unique selling points” and client bases make you throw your hands up in horror and you believe that marketing should be kept as far from teaching as possible, think again. Results from some of the country’s most challenged schools suggest that their fortunes where turned around not only by addressing the obvious problems – pupil behaviour, staff morale, budget difficulties – but by ensuring the good news was spread to parents and the community.

It is worth listening to Andy Kilpatrick, a head himself, and chair of the non-profit body set up to help maintained schools market themselves.

Mr Kilpatrick believes in marketing as a tool for school improvement, because, he says, before a school can promote itself to others it needs to work out what it is doing and how well it is doing it. He has seen the benefits for himself. His school, Northumberland Park secondary in Tottenham, was part of the London Challenge’s “Keys to Success” programme, aimed at helping the capital’s most challenged schools.

“My school had serious issues when I joined in 2004. It had one of the lowest attainment rates in London. We had a problem convincing the community that the school was worth having,” Mr Kilpatrick says.

As part of the scheme, the school worked with the Marketing Consultancy Grebot Donnelly to inform parents, pupils and the community of its aims and progress. Parents became more supportive as they began to understand what the school was doing and how it was improving. “Last year we were the most improved school in London. Engaging the parents is a huge part of focusing children on learning.” Mr Kilpatrick says.

As a result, Mr Kilpatrick convinced the London Challenge to set up Keys2Marketing in conjunction with Grebot Donnelly as another resource for London schools. What he hadn’t foreseen, he says, is how word of the scheme would spread outside London, and how much demand there would be. “There are 50 associated schools in London, and some have joined up in the West Country and the North. We underestimated just what a desperate need there was for this – there is an awareness that schools need to know much more about marketing themselves than they do.” he says.

Both Mr Kilpatrick and Macia Grebot, one of the directors of Grebot Donnelly, agree that the need for schools to know about marketing has grown from the changing ethos of education.

“Parents and children are seen as clients now; expectations are different. People want to find out about their children’s schools. To have them communicate with them,” she says.

Ms Grebot denies that there is a contradiction between the competitiveness that marketing implies, and the ideal of schools supporting each other by cooperation and shared expertise.

“We don’t see schools as in competition with each other. We want each to be the best in its area,” she says. She compares this to children carrying out the same project in class. “At one level they are competing, but they are also sharing knowledge and trying to do as well as they can in their own right,” she adds.

Schools that join Keys2Marketing pay £250 a year which gives them access to seminars, training courses and information via newsletter and a website. There is a “self-support” network, where a school can call in a “critical friend” from a list of advisers, if they need specific advice. If more help is needed, a tailored package can be put together for an additional charge. Working with the Keys to Success schools, Ms Grebot’s consultancy came to realise that the extraordinary improvements achieved by the most challenged schools in the scheme were not being recognised.

Keys2Marketing aims to change that, to get inner-city parents actively to want their children to go to their local school. “Our job is to get every secondary school to put out there just how good they are,” she says. “If you can begin to turn those negative perceptions around, everything improves – morale, staff attendance, parental support and kids’ behaviour. Kids want to be proud of their school.”