Living within your means

In the second of his series of articles on future challenges facing the independent schools sector, former HMC chairman Nigel Richardson looks at strategies of positioning and at how the sector should market itself better

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, whereas familiarity is said to breed contempt. Abroad, UK independent schools are a widespread source of admiration. Yet at home they are often under attack from people who blame them for the loss of social mobility in this country – even though opinion polls continue to show huge electoral support both for independent and for state grammar schools.

Our relatively small size as a sector means that our future lies largely in our own hands. Under the present
Labour government, we have to expect similar political, regulatory and other pressures to those that we have
experienced since 1997. A Conservative government won’t restore assisted places, and there will be no significant
reduction in regulation. Vouchers are unlikely in a first term. It remains to be seen just how much momentum
will remain in the academies’ programme, in the face of all the financial constraints on government from the global
downturn, and with the departure of Lord Adonis.

Yet, whichever government is in power in five years’ time, we face the likelihood of a far less economically
favourable climate and increasing competition from a maintained sector that is significantly better resourced
than a decade ago.

Vive la différence?
How distinctively different should we aim to be from maintained sector schools? All politicians believe that the taxpayer must be guaranteed a good return on the huge sums spent on education. As a result, government
control of the maintained sector curriculum has increased remorselessly over the past two decades – as evidenced
by increased testing and measuring of performance, and in the huge numbers of targets in the recently rolled-out early years’ curriculum. Further up the age-range, schools are expected to venture into all sorts of previously uncharted areas – citizenship, PSHE, financial management, happiness, anti-bullying, anti-obesity, generosity and philanthropy. As independent schools, we have greater curricular freedom than our maintained sector counterparts: should we use it, or embrace these new expectations on schools – and with them, their costs?

Can we do both?
With widespread concern about unsupervised  teenagers during long school holidays, we are likely to see
a growing move within the maintained sector towards a new national pattern of term dates, with more, shorter
terms – or whatever schools, university selectors and exam boards may wish for. If so, shall we have slavishly to
follow, or should we look for opportunities to emphasise our differences?

High-quality pastoral care offers us the opportunity to continue being real centres of excellence. Much has already changed for the better: some schools would once have viewed collaboration with (for example) a clinical
psychologist as anathema: many were sceptical about specialist learning support. With increasing fragmentation
of traditional family patterns, we shall be ever-more involved in providing specialist support for children who
need it. Is it too fanciful to suggest that we need to be prepared to counsel children on issues of identity, as a
result of the huge advances in genetics and conception in recent years?

Could or should our schools compensate for the decline of voluntary youth groups such as the scouts? Can we find effective ways of equipping pupils with interests that they will carry through their lives, into an old age which may be longer than it was for previous generations, even if they have to work to the age of 65 or more? Can we do anything to relieve the league-table pressures on pupils and staff?

Can we train staff more effectively to handle difficult parents who are simply stressed out? We are all familiar with the helicopter parent, but do we do enough to prepare new, young staff for the demands of parents’ evenings? Could we learn from big retail companies about how to handle customer complaints – or tap in to the range of courses on offer in mediation techniques? Heads need this training too; it is much easier to defend your staff from unreasonably assertive parents if your school is full, and if you are an experienced head who has had teenage children yourself. Yet, in my experience, almost no parent will refuse to back down in situations of conflict, if one’s tactics are well thought-out.

Prepare yourself
We shall need more effective marketing. As individual schools, are we sure that we are getting all we can out of our websites? Our future clientele are from a generation (unlike mine) that goes to the web much more than the
printed prospectus. We don’t spend enough time and resources on making sure that sites are consumer-friendly,
easy to navigate, and stuffed neither with earnest cliché, nor with arcane terminology comprehensible only to
the insider. Too many school sites are full of old news. The webmaster needs to be constantly working, term-time
and holidays, making sure that the site is always fresh and topical – even if you have to pay good money for whoever has that role. Why are flourishing schools so reticent about including information about overall numbers – or, indeed, about forthcoming changes of head – in an age when the media tells prospective parents that the size of a school and the quality of its head are crucial to its success?

Could do better
There is a parallel marketing challenge too. Because our schools are independent, they tend to operate in isolation
from each other. As a result, our collective PR as a sector has been tentative at best in recent years. We have fought
shy of promoting real debate about the age at which selection might begin, allowing our opponents to brand us as mindless supporters of a return to the old 11+ exam. We have been insufficiently proactive on the needs of
the really gifted and talented, especially at Key Stage 3 and beyond.

We have been slow to promote the danger of monopolies, which is what a totally state-run education system would be. We could make more of how entire university departments in some key subjects such as hard science, engineering and medicine depend on our sector.

We have underestimated the negative impact of once-forgotten words that have become widespread again,
such as “posh” and “toff”. It’s not too late to address these issues. However, no amount of blowing our own trumpet about being centres of excellence and caring communities is going to carry conviction unless we can show that we don’t just cherry-pick clever and uncomplicated pupils, or give scholarships to families that don’t really need them financially. Means-tested bursaries will be the order of the day – and will require us to give a much greater priority to fundraising.

Our treasures
Our amazingly talented teachers are our greatest resource. There will be challenges in keeping staff fresh until they
are 65 and finding new sources of recruitment – perhaps a Teach Second scheme? We need more training in
leadership skills for senior managers, with both new and experienced heads drawing on experience beyond the
world of education. Moreover, many of today’s deputies are tomorrow’s heads: do we allow them sufficient
experience of governing bodies, through attending sub-committees? Governors need more training in large
project management and succession planning and knowledge of how to assess their own effectiveness, both
as individuals and as a board.

Will our successful schools continue to grow in size, reflecting economies of scale in their operations, or will
the 1970s mantra that small is beautiful reassert itself? One thing is certain, though: if, as schools and a sector,
we make ourselves consciously more different, we invite further brickbats about being toffs. But if we merely
follow what others do, we diminish the justification for our continuing existence. Achieving the right balance
between these two strategies may turn out to be our biggest challenge of all.

Dr Nigel Richardson was chairman of HMC in 2007 and head of the Perse School, Cambridge from 1994 to 2008. He now works as a staff appraiser and consultant to independent schools. This article is based on a presentation made at the autumn strategy conference organised by mtmconsulting and Veale Wasbrough in September 2008.

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