Your school’s DNA

Marketing within schools is often geared towards prospective parents, but understanding your current parents is a critical aspect that is frequently overlooked. Kate Nicholson shows how to be sensitive to their preferences

Schools evolve over time, which means that the experience for a child attending a particular school today will be different from when their parent attended the same school a few decades ago. Many factors can alter a particular school experience. The most significant of these is a change in headship or to the school make-up ie expansion into earlier/later years, a move to co-education or an increase in overall school size. However, more subtle changes such as amendments to the school curriculum, the facilities or teaching personnel can all have some impact.

It is easy for a school to lose sight of what its own parent body thinks and feels and this can have a number of ramifications. Regular evaluation of parent views, every three to four years, will keep your understanding up-to-
date and enable future initiatives to be informed by parental opinion.

Impact on current parents
A school that no longer meets current parent expectations is vulnerable; particularly at the most obvious exit points
(sixth form at senior school and Years 3 and 6 at prep schools). Parents are not necessarily looking for the same school to provide a full junior or senior education any more and will reappraise their child’s education at different stages during their child’s time at the school.

Impact on prospective parents
One of the most revealing results of a parent survey, conducted by RSAcademics, is a current parent’s likelihood to recommend the school to other parents”.

Of the 65 prep and senior schools surveyed to date, the spectrum of scores for this measure is huge, ranging from
just 34 per cent of parents definitely recommending their school at the bottom, to an impressive 88 per cent for the
top school in the survey.

The biggest differences in advocacy scores are among the boarding schools, where the care and communication
with parents provided by the boarding staff, the activities over the weekend and the boarding accommodation are
important drivers.

Senior day schools have higher average levels of recommendation, with the top schools tending to achieve well in public exam results, smaller class sizes and academic stretching. Single-sex senior schools top the tables in parent
recommendation, but also have a broader range of scores compared to co-ed schools, so some schools are clearly
not delivering for parents. Single-sex schools tend to perform better than co-eds in terms of behaviour and
appearance of pupils, and results in public exams.

In prep schools, a lack of communication with parents, together with a low rating of the leadership, predominantly defines those schools that perform less well in terms of satisfaction or recommendation and so fall to the bottom of the table.

A low recommendation score in any school, in fact, often comes with low satisfaction on a number of attributes. One of the most common problems associated with low advocacy is a breakdown in communication with parents. The specific features that emerge with low scores can include the feedback on a child’s progress, the way the school deals with parental concerns, communication with teachers and overall approachability of staff.

A measure of relationship warmth from parent to the school and their perception of how the school feels about them will often also be very low, with parents feeling distanced and uninvolved.

A happy parent is a valuable ambassador for the school and represents the best form of publicity a school can have. Conversely, an unhappy parent can cause a negative impact. Even the view of a parent who is simply indifferent to the school should not be underestimated, especially in the context of other parents praising their particular chosen school.

Strategies for success
Is there a winning formula for a successful school? The parent survey confirms that the key to success is meeting
and surpassing parent expectations for that individual school. This first requires an understanding of what are
realistic and achievable expectations, which truly reflect the school, and then these should form the basis of the
promises made to prospective parents. A low score in satisfaction or recommendation for a school in the survey
is often the result of expectations being raised and then not fulfilled.

This underlines the importance of being true to your school’s positioning and not trying to be everything to everyone. A typical example would be a school that offers fantastic sports facilities and promises sports training as a major strength. This then may be a critical factor for prospective parents during the decision-making process and delivery of this promise to all parents is therefore essential. Current parents who find that their less talented children or late developers are not in the school teams, or are receiving less coaching, feel excluded from this provision and start to question the value for money they get compared to others.

There is no single school profile that promises success, but rather a different recipe for every school. For example,
there are schools in the bottom quartile in terms of public exam results that are still up with the top schools for
recommendation. The successful delivery of attributes promised to parents, which could be a wide-ranging
extracurricular programme, music, performing arts or sports provision, is what provides current parents with
high levels of satisfaction.

Not surprisingly, pastoral care features very strongly across all types of schools regardless of their specific positioning. Out of a list of around 40 school attributes, three school features that correlate most strongly with high parent advocacy in senior schools are:
• school’s attitude to concerns;
• treating pupils as individuals; and
• concern for the wellbeing of the child.

One of the least influential attributes on high recommendation scores for current parents is “the state of repair or appearance of the school”. This is more important to prospective parents. This provides interesting food for thought for your refurbishment programme; it is only superficial to your success, but, critically, at the entry level.

Kate Nicholson heads up quantitative research studies and the parents survey at RSAcademics. Kate can be contacted on 01572 821306 or info@rsacademics.co.uk

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