By Heather Styche-Patel, CEO
The independent school market has changed significantly, and not simply because fees have increased. Affordability is under greater pressure. Birth rates have been falling for some time and smaller cohorts are already moving through the system. However, the parents making decisions about independent education are changing too, as are the ways in which they research, compare and choose schools.
At the recent HMC Conference, I talked about three questions which I think help schools make sense of what they are seeing:
- Are the families there?
- Can they afford us?
- Will they choose us?
They sound simple, but they describe quite different challenges.
If the number of children in your realistic market is falling, better marketing cannot create more children. If there are sufficient families but fewer can afford the fees, you have an affordability issue. And if there are enough families who can afford you but they are choosing another school, you need to understand why.
The difficulty is that schools don’t always have enough evidence to know which of these is driving what they see.
What do families value now?
The third question, will they choose us?, is becoming particularly interesting. Schools have traditionally had familiar ways of describing their value: results, teaching, facilities, opportunities, pastoral care and the breadth of the experience they provide. Those things haven’t suddenly become unimportant. But our research suggests the way families think about value is evolving.
Parents are making a significant financial commitment in a less certain world. They are asking questions about what an education will enable for their child and looking for evidence that what a school promises is what their child will actually experience. This has implications not just for recruitment, but for retention too. Families don’t make the value judgement once at the point of entry and then forget about it:
Recruitment is a choice.
Retention is a choice made again.
Knowing what parents value, where their confidence is strongest and where it begins to weaken is therefore increasingly important.
Do you know, or do you think you know?
For 25 years, RSAcademics has focused on understanding parents and school markets. Today we hear directly from thousands of parents every year, across many different types of schools. That gives us a perspective which is difficult to replicate from within one school.
And one thing our research has taught us repeatedly is the danger of assuming that what a school thinks its parents value is necessarily what parents themselves would say. A parent survey can help. But on its own it is only part of the picture.
What are prospective families telling you? Why did some choose another school? Why are others leaving? What does your admissions pipeline show? How is your catchment changing? How does what your parents are telling you compare with what we are seeing elsewhere?
Bringing those different perspectives together can produce a very different understanding of the challenge. And then comes the question we think is most important:
So what?
Collecting data is relatively easy. Knowing what to ask, understanding what the evidence really means and deciding what to do as a result is much harder. That is where our 25 years of research, our breadth of evidence and our understanding of schools come together.
We can help you understand what your parents really think and what is happening in your market. But we don’t stop with the findings. We help you work out what they mean for your school and what you should do next.
If you think you know what is driving recruitment, retention and parental choice in your school, perhaps you should ask yourself this question: how do you know?