6 strategies to grow school enrolments
Long article: 15 minute read
Current situation
Schools across Australia are having conversations about how to remain competitive in today's rapidly changing world. One thing they always raise is how they lack the expertise to grow: it simply isn't part of the resource set of a traditional school.
When schools are under pressure the result is often consecutive falls in enrolments, or a lack of growth in newer schools. Reasons for this can be multifaceted. School reputations, or the lack of them, can affect the enrolment decision. Families may no longer have the discretionary income to send their children to a fee paying school. Valuable word of mouth recommendations to new families may not happen any longer. Cutbacks on staff and services become necessary as enrolments decline, further reducing the school’s capability to excel. Feedback from families about the school's performance overall can become negative. It becomes difficult to reverse the cycle.
This paper outlines 6 strategies that can combat falling enrolments and help schools reposition themselves to become a place families enjoy and recommend.
Research: Start with understanding your community
Understanding your community is a fundamental first step to lay the foundations for your school’s future. Interview and survey your school’s families; other local families with children; and other active community players, to learn what is really needed for your school and area.
Information from this research will help you to identify which families you should target to grow enrolments. We group similar families into cohorts called ‘target segments’.
Research matters: Finding out what your families and community want from your school is fundamental to designing the right growth strategies.
It is much easier to plan for growth when you know who to focus on and what they want.
Strategy 1: Adjusting your value proposition
Your value proposition is core to what type of school you are and what you offer families. All other strategies hinge on this. Decide who your ideal student and family are, then create the right value proposition for them. To adjust your value proposition, start by:
Getting the basic things your families need up to the right standard.
Your classrooms, outdoor areas, curriculum, facilities, teachers, and leadership team, among other things, need to meet quality standards set out by the government. This paper assumes your school has met the standards needed to operate.
Getting the things that are overdone down to the minimum, and putting those resources into something else more useful.
Despite being located in the heart of Silicon Valley, the world’s high-tech epicentre, the Waldorf School of the Peninsula believes that the use of technology in education is overdone. Apple, eBay, Google, and Yahoo employees send their children to a school with no screens, tablets, or smartphones.
Instead of relying on software to deliver their lessons, the Waldorf School invests its resources in great teachers who focus on student care. All subjects are taught using games, projects, and exploration. For example, certain maths principles are taught through knitting, languages are practised during games, and storytelling plays a central role. They believe this is the best way to develop creativity and innovation: skills that are valued by technology companies.
Neither the teachers nor the parents are worried about the students lagging behind in their technology education. They claim technology is getting simpler and more intuitive every year, so students will easily catch up. For them, it is more important develop a child as a person.
Considering the rush of most schools to use technology in the classroom, the Waldorf School’s approach is an interesting alternative that is valuable for their target segment.
Clintondale, located in a suburb of Detroit, pioneered a flipped classroom model at the K–12 level. A financially challenged public school, three-quarters of whose students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, Clintondale sought out a radical solution to its then-failing educational model. It abandoned the traditional classwork/homework paradigm, turning the standard learning model on its head.
Starting with its ninth-grade class, Clintondale had students watch teachers’ lessons at home; then, they would come into school to do “homework” with the guidance of their teachers. Clintondale used its teachers’ time to focus on coaching and problem solving rather than lecturing. The children were provided with the food and technology they needed to perform well.
Traditional lessons that were previously overdone became simpler to teach online, and teachers could coach students more effectively in the time they had at school.
Offering more of inexpensive things that parents and students ask for.
English language classes were redesigned at Francis Hammond (a school in Virginia) because its predominantly immigrant students needed more support. The school’s students are from families that often have less than 4 years’ experience with English.
Instead of studying English separately, students have language lessons integrated into their entire academic curricula. Additionally, students are not divided into groups based on their English proficiency level, but rather work together on collaborative projects. In this way, students fine-tune conversational skills and learn from one another.
English language is not a significant cost to the school. Offering more of it in a restructured way has ensured the school can better meet the needs of its community.
Price-pointing the expensive things that parents and students ask for.
Brisbane State High School provides language studies as part of its curriculum. It offers overseas student exchanges to augment its language studies and to help students gain a deeper cultural understanding, however these are at an additional cost for families.
Yanco Agricultural School in rural New South Wales teaches equine and horse management. Students participating in these subjects can keep a horse at school, dependent upon stable availability, and take an active role in caring for their animal. Additional fees are required to stable a horse at school.
The Australian Science and Mathematics School offers Aviation to its students. It covers theory required by the Civil Aviation Safety Authority’s (CASA) ‘Basic Aeronautical Knowledge’ syllabus. Practical work includes training on state of the art flight simulators. Training time in a real airplane is not a required part of the syllabus and comes at an additional cost.
Strategy 2: Specialise
Schools that strive to meet the needs of everyone across the board, without thinking of what their community truly values, tend to flounder. Schools that are renowned for rugby; Japanese language; developing social adeptness; robotics; or pastoral care, are beacons for families who resonate with those things. Developing a reputation will create a niche that will encourage those families to enrol. Your research will help to indicate what your community would value. This is as much about working out which families you can’t serve well, as much as it is about building a magnet for those you want to focus on.
The Queensland Academy for Creative Industries (QACI) in Brisbane offers a curriculum focused on the creative industries (dance, drama, music and art). Students are also able to take the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme, meaning they can easily apply to international universities.
They have specialised in two valuable areas: Parents send their children to QACI when they have shown a competence or ambition in the creative industries, or if they wish to study abroad. Overseas expatriates to Australia send their children to QACI because the curriculum follows international standards and allows their children to move schools more easily when families are reposted. Local families send their children to QACI to help them develop their creative interests alongside their high school study.
Strategy 3: Your students might come from unexpected places
High Tech High is a California-based school group that shows how education can be redesigned to ensure all students graduate well prepared for college, work, and citizenship. It has an appealing 100% success rate in achieving places for its students after graduation.
Rather than using a traditional curriculum, High Tech High specialises in using technology focused school-to-work strategies, including company internships and other forms of field work. The school cleverly supports an established technology focused ecosystem in California.
Their alternative style of education helped it to discover an unexpected group of students: adult learners. The group now includes a network of grade K-12 charter schools, a teacher certification program, and a graduate school.
High Tech High has produced a team of robotics enthusiasts called the ‘Holy Cows’. They regularly win international robotics competitions and have created an in-depth series of tutorials that other robotics students and competitors can access called ‘CowTips’.
By successfully specialising, High Tech High provides the California community with the graduates it needs and cements its international reputation. It has also opened them to a new segment: adult learners.
Strategy 4: Changing from passive to active marketing
Most schools will include some local newspaper advertising plus billboards into their marketing actions. They may also have a social media team which posts updates online via channels like Facebook or Instagram. This is a passive way to market to your community and creates overall awareness. But it is not ‘active’ or targeted…
Classic marketing positioning is about matching your so-called ‘4Ps’ to the needs and preferences of your target market segment. For example, if you are a school (like Yanco Agricultural School) in a regional location where a target segment come from farms you might think about:
Product: Ensuring your curriculum leads directly into Primary Industry related traineeships and degrees.
Price: Lessening the financial pressure on farmers depending on the economy or during droughts by offering alternative payment options.
Place: Offering some courses by distance, on the farm, or online depending on the needs of your families. You might also change semesters to fit around peak periods on the farm (like harvest time).
Promotion: Finding channels that farmers would access, including promoting your school at agricultural fairs.
Berkhamsted School is located in an affluent area North-West of London. It has a history encompassing 475 years and has maintained its enrolment uptake by focusing on the right offering for its local families.
The school invests a minimal amount in traditional marketing. Instead, it organises annual events that bring a targeted audience onto campus. The school believes that getting prospective families on the grounds is critical to recruiting new students.
The ‘Berkhamsted Ferrari Festival’ was held in August 2015. Over 60 Ferraris were driven in a parade through the town into the quad of the Boys’ School. It attracted attention from car enthusiasts, local families and the media. Once families were on campus, they could experience the school and get a sense of what it might be like for their children.
Our research shows that families are 70% more likely to enrol after they have visited the school and experienced its culture.
Strategy 5: Digital marketing
An effective digital marketing strategy can amplify your traditional marketing, putting you in front of exactly the audience you want to reach. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter can be powerful tools for reaching your audience. 16 million Australians are using Facebook in some way: it is the most useful platform for targeting specific audiences because it collects so much demographic data. For schools, attracting people who wouldn’t otherwise notice you can be achieved by communicating on Facebook.
Your entire strategy needs to be customer centric rather than school centric. Use your research to understand what families want and communicate how you solve it.
Attract: Design something your families would find useful or thought provoking: a video, a paper, or an event. St Margaret’s Anglican Girls’ School (in Brisbane) has a downloadable paper on its website entitled: ‘Top 10 Tips for Parents from 10 Top Educators’. A targeted Facebook advertisement would be an ideal way to promote the paper to parents.
Convert: Any visitors who wish to download the ‘Top 10 Tips for Parents’ paper needs to enter their email address, and a PDF is sent directly to their inbox. St Margaret’s School now knows you are interested in the school and have your email address. Schools might also ask for a phone number and call directly.
Engage: The school can then follow up with something else families might find interesting, like an event or open day. If a school can encourage a family onto its campus, it is 70% more likely to convert them to enrol. Critically this request for action is active marketing.
Sell: Once you have developed a relationship with your family, you can make them an offer which meets their needs. Those who haven’t yet accepted an offer can be kept engaged in the school with relevant information emails or invitations.
Connect: After your students have enrolled, maintaining a connection is important to ensure your families are happy and recommend your school. Our research shows that at schools with no other enrolment strategies, 8 out of 10 students enrolled because someone recommended the school. Maintaining a dialogue with your enrolled families will ensure you are meeting their needs and are adapting to your community the right way. This can be done online and in person.
Strategy 6: Word of mouth marketing
Our research shows that at schools with no other enrolment strategies, 8 out of 10 students enrolled because someone recommended the school. Unfortunately, after enrolment 1 in 5 parents become detractors.
Recommendations from current or past families, and the wider school community, are the most common and valuable way for schools to attract new students. People who recommend schools tend to understand the school’s values, are committed in some way, and trust that the school will deliver on their recommendation.Before on embarking on a word of mouth marketing campaign, the school needs to discover and solve any issues that may be detracting from a great recommendation. Using a Net Promoter Score survey can help uncover those issues.
Creating a group of advocates in your community will help generate word of mouth marketing. Your local doctor, real estate agent, yoga studio and radio station all have regular contact with your audience. Create an occasion for them to get to know your school and talk about it.
Drive advocacy for your school by creating a ‘Purple Cow’ (described in Seth Godin’s book of the same name): something remarkable that people want to talk about. For example, schoolchildren in Finland have a mandatory 15-minute outdoor free-play break every hour of every day. Fresh air, nature and regular physical activity breaks are considered engines of learning. Parents internationally talk about the progressive education of Finnish children. In Australia, this would be so different as to be considered a ‘Purple Cow’.
Where to next?
The strategies outlined in this paper are designed to provide insights into how you might grow enrolments.
Coriolis Innovation uses a combination of research, strategic design, and creative problem-solving techniques to help schools discover their growth potential.
You are welcome to reach out for a conversation on how we can help you achieve this.