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mtm SCHOOL MATTERS ISSUE 18
JANUARY 2015
01 mtmconsulting ltd. Portland House, 43 High Street, Southwold, IP18 6AB
TEL: 01502 722787 FAX: 01502 722305 www.mtmconsulting.co.uk
Page 3:
Could a MYSTERY SHOP
be your ‘cabbie’s guide’?
If you would like to receive a digital version of School
Matters please let us know.
Email: [email protected]
Fees: ‘Schools should help
parents spread the burden’ Exclusive: JUSTIN URQUHART STEWART, Head of Corporate Development at Seven Investment Management, talks to Dick Davison for
mtmconsulting’s School Matters.
The most intelligent and insightful advice for independent schools
In this
issue:
A s independent school fees get more expensive,
schools are going to have to take the initiative in finding ways to help parents pay fees, according to the
UK’s best-known financial pundit.
Justin Urquhart Stewart, one of the most recognisable and trusted
market commentators in print and broadcast media, believes that
schools should find trusted financial partners to offer parents sav-
ings and investment packages which will help spread the cost of
education over ten years or more.
In an exclusive interview for mtmconsulting, he said: “One of the
great strengths of the British independent schools is that they are
and see that can help you pay the fees over the
next ten or 20 years.”
And it would not just be for parents. The liberalisa-
tion of pension funds means that grandparents will
be free to make use of their funds in ways which are
appropriate to them and their families.
Page 4:
Five New Year RESEARCH
resolutions
Page 5:
GRAPHICS: To see is to
discover
Page 6:
mtmconsulting’s next
INSIGHT event
► Continued on page 2
We wish all our readers a very happy and prosperous New Year.
mtmCONSULTING strategy for education
British – that’s why so many people world-
wide want to send their children here. But it
is increasingly difficult for British parents to
be able to afford what wealthy overseas par-
ents can have.
“I would urge schools to find other creative
ways of financing school fees.” Urquhart
Stewart, who was the keynote speaker at
mtmconsulting’s autumn strategy conference
last term, added: “Schools should be looking
to partner with people who can design
schemes for them so that parents, having
seen what the fees are can see straightaway
that there’s a programme which you can join
Justin Urquhart Stewart
02 mtmconsulting ltd, Portland House, 43 High Street, Southwold, IP18 6AB
TEL: 01502 722787 FAX: 01502 722305 www.mtmconsulting.co.uk
ISSUE 18 mtm SCHOOL MATTERS
“A lot of grandparents are very happy to help. I
was the beneficiary myself of a family trust from
grandparents which paid for my education. A lot
of those old systems have been dropped or been
forgotten about.
“So what schools need now is a good financial
planning company to be able to co-ordinate that
and make sure that money is passed across the
generations in a tax-efficient way. Pensions can
now be inherited; ISAs can be inherited as well.
Financial partnership
“These are all things which can be used but it
needs a bit of financial construction; the school
would not have to get involved in the detailed
structuring of products or anything like that.
Schools should stick to what they do best, edu-
cating people superbly, but should bring in re-
sponsible financial services bodies to try and de-
sign the products for them and make it easier for
parents to be able to afford it.”
Another area in which schools can develop their
entrepreneurialism and their contribution to their
communities simultaneously, he believes, is by
tapping into the expertise of their former pupils.
Disclosing that he contributes to a ‘business
week’ at his old school, Bryanston, in Dorset, he
said: “Partly this event is to help pupils with how
they get into business, what educational qualifi-
cations they need and so on. But it also helps to
create what is almost a local business unit which
can actually help local businesses get going and
understand what it is that makes business tick.
“That means you are participating more in the
community which increasingly schools are ex-
pected to do. Even without the headlines of the
past few weeks, you would be foolish as a school
if you were not doing that.”
International problems ahead?
Urquhart Stewart is generally more optimistic
about the general economic outlook than many
commentators but he believes there are specific
difficulties ahead for schools recruiting in certain
parts of the world.
“Despite what the prime minister said, when he
returned from the G20 summit, about flashing
lights on the dashboard, the global economy is
still growing at about 3% a year.
“China will be growing at a reasonable level,
somewhere between 5% and 8%. In South East
Asia, a lot of countries are benefiting from lower
oil prices and this is the game changer for China,
India, Taiwan, South Korea, and all of those
► Continued from page 1
countries which import a lot of commodities. The
people who suffer are the oil producers – the
Middle East, Russia, Venezuela, Nigeria – and
the commodity producers as well – Brazil, Chile,
Zambia, South Africa.”
In the medium term, this will have an effect on
overseas recruitment, he believes. “The Far East
will still be a good place for schools to market,
whereas places like Russia and Kazakhstan will
be suffering significantly and that’s going to take
some time to turn around. In the Middle East,
probably enough wealth has been created there
but even Saudi Arabia is losing on its oil produc-
tion at the moment.”
Customers of the future
Despite his general optimism, however, he says
economic recovery in the UK will be “low and
slow”. Most people still do not feel any better off
and are likely to face only slow increases in their
income and higher rather than lower taxes in the
near to mid term.
But he adds: “What is good news is what is
clearly a phenomenal growth of entrepreneurial-
ism – people setting up new businesses. It’s true
that a high proportion of these are life style busi-
nesses, nail bars and the like, but notwithstand-
ing there is still a rising number of interesting
businesses.
“For people managing the finances of schools
that may be no great comfort at the moment but
in a few years time a number of those busi-
nesses will be successful and that will be the
area you need to target. That is where the
wealth creation will be in this country and those
will be the people who will look to have their
children privately educated.”
Oil production in the Russian Arctic: falling oil prices and pressure on the rouble could mean long-term dif-ficulties in pupil recruitment.
Pic
ture
: Krichevsky
03 mtmconsulting ltd, Portland House, 43 High Street, Southwold, IP18 6AB
TEL: 01502 722787 FAX: 01502 722305 www.mtmconsulting.co.uk
mtm SCHOOL MATTERS
The mystery shopper Jack Palfrey suggests going undercover … and ‘calling a cab’
S hopping is changing. The high street has
become a virtual (if not always virtuous) ex-
perience. The search for must-have items is now
conducted largely online. We may still have the
need to see and touch, but the problems associ-
ated with time and travel are being eliminated.
As the range of goods on offer online has in-
creased, so have the ways of selecting them.
The bane for retailers is ‘showcasing’; choosing
the wanted item in person and then resorting to
the internet for the best availability and price.
When parents search for schools, the process is
reversed. They make enquiries through local and
personal knowledge, study guides, newspaper
and magazine features and online searches.
When it comes to organising visits to schools,
however, parents are sometimes reluctant, fear-
ing to be overawed or seen as time-wasters.
So parents sometimes need a proxy. And the
schools themselves, aware of local competition,
want to be assured that they have visitor-appeal.
This is where ‘mystery shoppers’ come in, mak-
ing assessments about how prospective parents
are treated by reception, clerical and academic
staff as well as by pupils.
For more information about mystery shopping and
other research services email
The professional undercover operator sees
what internal reviews miss. I recently visited a
school with an imposing frontage, impressive
front desk and imperial-style hall. Some adult
visitors might be reassured by this route to the
Head’s study. Any accompanying child may well
be overwhelmed.
Experienced, relaxed, objective-assessments of
introductory experiences at schools are crucial to
their marketing. These assessments are a bit like
‘the knowledge’ acquired by London taxicab-
drivers. Information about the inside working of
schools matters.
Schools, like supermarkets, emit all kinds of
signals, explicit and implicit. Dangers occur when
retailers and educators fail to signal their aims
and would-be customers and prospective-
parents are not attracted, sometimes by too
much information - ‘paralysis by analysis’.
Let an mtm ‘mystery shopper’ be your informed
cabbie along these routes.
“Fantastically organised event full of information. Good to talk to other schools and hear their experiences”
mtmconsulting Annual Strategy Conference
The 10th anniversary mtmconsulting Annual Strategy Conference in October 2014 was a resounding success, with our widest range of delegates yet: heads, marketing managers, bursars, governors and investors. For this exciting and engaging day, we would like to thank our speakers and delegates for the stimulating debates.
Our speakers demonstrated that much has changed in the recent past in the economy and consequently in the independent edu-cation sector, leading to increased competition. Practical ways forward were discussed and delegates took away useful strategies to implement in their own schools.
This year we will be holding events to include more in-depth sessions on research, marketing, branding and strategic issues.
“Superb!!! My first, not my last”
Register your interest in future mtmconsulting events
email: [email protected]
04 mtmconsulting ltd, Portland House, 43 High Street, Southwold, IP18 6AB
TEL: 01502 722787 FAX: 01502 722305 www.mtmconsulting.co.uk
mtm SCHOOL MATTERS
1 Know your marketplace
It is crucial that the whole leadership team knows the
school’s potential market and its capacity to continue to
recruit pupils.
mtmMandarin catch-
ment area research
can tell you how
many families in your
area are able to afford
the fees and have
school age children,
as well as where they
live. It plots your cur-
rent market penetra-
tion within each postcode sector in your catchment area.
It will help you understand how numbers of potential pu-
pils in the area will change in future, which areas you cur-
rently recruit well from, and how competitor schools might
influence parental choice of school.
T hrough the long autumn term, the list of
‘important things to do next week’ grows
ever longer, writes James Leggett,
mtmconsulting’s Project Manager.
Christmas is a welcome break: a moment to
prepare for the year ahead, and a new chance
to prioritise. Research often slips down as the
daily grind takes over.
With the impact of recession and falling af-
fordability, a core issue for many independent
schools is pupil recruitment. Now the numbers
for 2014/15 have settled and numbers for
2015/16 are becoming clearer, it’s time for an
evidence-based understanding of your school’s
position, market and parental satisfaction to
inform strategies for maintaining pupil num-
bers. Further to our recent research guide,
here are top five research tips to help you.
Five New Year
research
resolutions
4 See where you miss out
No feedback is more valuable than that from parents who
have made an enquiry, or perhaps even registered, but do
not go on enrol. Our ‘decliner’ (also called ‘non-buyer’ or
‘non-joiner’) interviews are carried out by our professional
in-house research team, not subcontracted out.
We enquire in detail to understand what they wanted of a
school, which other schools they visited, why they made
their choice and what they really thought of your school.
2 Listen to your parents
Every leadership team needs to understand why parents
chose their school, what they expect from it, how they
would describe it, how satisfied they are, whether they
would recommend it and what the priorities for improve-
ment are. Parental survey work answers these questions
through a secure and efficient online questionnaire.
Parents like to be asked for their feedback; asking for it
shows a responsive and open outlook, making parents and
pupils feel valued. Focus groups can explore key issues in
more depth and allow parents to speak candidly about
their experiences and concerns.
Promoter Detractor
“The school has a fantastic feel but we didn’t get to meet
headmaster there. We didn’t get a feel for the culture or
ethos of the school. [Competitor] made the headmaster and
staff very available and this made a real difference.”
3 See what visitors see....
Mystery shopping is a fantastic way to understand how
your school appears to visiting parents, and the impres-
sion you make on them (see page 3), with feedback and
recommendations for you to improve the way you re-
spond, from the initial phone call through to the visit and
tour.
And we can mystery shop your competitors too.........
5 Assess your school marketing
Marketing capability and resources in some schools have
not kept up with an increasingly competitive market place.
In some areas, competition is fierce from other independ-
ent providers with academies, free schools and maintained
schools upping their game. Good schools with excellent
reputations have lost market share because their market-
ing is not appropriate for current and future conditions.
Is your marketing organisation effective and efficient? Are
you targeting the right areas? Are you spending too
much? Do you know how many enquiries you need to
generate for every admission?
Every leadership team should be able to answer these
questions. Our audits take the form of a one- or two- day
visit, incorporating a tour of the school and meetings with
all marketing or admissions staff. We assess every aspect
of your marketing, including communications and tracking,
and make recommendations for the future.
05 mtmconsulting ltd, Portland House, 43 High Street, Southwold, IP18 6AB
TEL: 01502 722787 FAX: 01502 722305 www.mtmconsulting.co.uk
ISSUE 18 mtm SCHOOL MATTERS
C harles Joseph Minard’s 19th century map
of Napoleon’s ill-fated march on Moscow in
1812 “may well be the best statistical graphic
ever drawn” wrote Edward Tufte, Princeton pro-
fessor and pioneer in the field of data visualiza-
tion, in his acclaimed 1983 book The Visual Dis-
play of Quantitative Information. One of the rea-
sons for Tufte’s judgment was that the map cap-
tured and displayed six separate variables – an
amazing achievement of clarity and dexterity.
“Good data visualization takes the burden of
effort off the brain and puts it on the
eyes” (Niels Hoven, writing on the Tableau soft-
ware blog). Indeed, when data is well presented
it allows the brain not to have to hold reams of
information at once but instead to start exploring
issues, discovering patterns and asking why
things are as they are. When we were updating
our Mandarin pupil mapping service earlier this
year we wanted to increase the level of analysis,
primarily by capturing more than two variables
in a summary graph.
Traditionally when evaluating how a school is
doing in its marketplace we focused on two fac-
tors: how many independent school pupils in
total live in a particular area; and how many of
those pupils already attend the school. We now
also consider how far away the area is from the
school. Your market share is likely to be higher
the closer you are to the school. Convenience is
an important factor in school choice, and parents
might even have moved house to be near one.
The further away parents live, the more likely it
becomes that competing schools are closer and
that you will have a harder sell to them.
The towns, suburbs and villages in a school
catchment area are ranked from nearest to fur-
thest and arranged along the x-axis in that or-
der. Each of these places is then represented by
a column. The width of the column corresponds
to the total estimated number of independent
school pupils living there. The shading of the col-
umn is the school’s current share of that total.
There are several benefits of such an analysis.
Firstly it prompts you to consider the places
where you have particularly high or low market
shares, given their distance from the school. In
the chart below there are three thick black verti-
cal lines demarcating the places that are up to
10-, 20- and 30-minutes away from the school.
There are two places just under 10-minutes
away that this school is significantly under-
represented in. Secondly this analysis allows you
to assess which places of low share you should
pay the most attention to, given the size of their
markets. When prioritizing marketing actions it
would usually be better to focus on the wider
columns than the thinner ones. And thirdly this
analysis quantifies the potential payback of mar-
keting in different areas given that each square
is exactly proportional to the number of new pu-
pils that can be gained.
We can add other variables to such charts us-
ing colour-coding. These might be such things as
the strongest perceived competitor in each area,
whether a place is served by a school bus or its
forecast population growth over the next 10-
years. Once these charts are in the hands of
your marketers then all kinds of prioritised action
plans emerge. What’s more, each action can
have a quantifiable target of the number of new
pupils to be recruited in each place.
• For more information about how to use research to underpin your marketing strategy contact:
Gavin Humphries, mtmconsulting Lead Strategy Consultant , describes how graphics help to understand complex market data
Seeing is discovering
06 mtmconsulting ltd, Portland House, 43 High Street, Southwold, IP18 6AB
TEL: 01502 722787 FAX: 01502 722305 www.mtmconsulting.co.uk
ISSUE 18 mtm SCHOOL MATTERS
The INSIGHTS Series
MARKETING: HOME AND ABROAD The mtmconsulting ‘Insights’ events enable delegates to access the latest
research and ideas, and to apply them in their schools.
The next ‘Insights’ will be a practical session for Heads, Bursars, Marketing Managers, SMT members and Governors who want to develop their UK and international marketing and achieve a strategic advantage over competitors.
Tuesday 10 February 2015 at the
Cavalry & Guards Club, 127 Piccadilly, W1J 7PX
Book y
our
place N
OW
The programme includes:
Gavin Humphries, mtmconsulting Lead Strategy Consultant: New research
methods and how these underpin your strategy.
Jan Shilling, Director of Marketing and Communications, King’s Rochester:
Successfully meeting the marketing challenge for England’s second-oldest
school, surrounded by free grammar schools.
Suzanne Rowse, British Boarding Schools Workshop: Working effectively with
agents as part of a successful international marketing strategy.
"The mtm insights series are a fantastic opportunity to understand exactly what is
happening in the independent schools market and specifically, our local area. It is a
wonderful opportunity to meet likeminded individuals. With the guidance and support
from mtm we feel we have a better understanding of how to progress the business
and meet the needs of our local market".
Holly Christie, Parkhill School, Kingston upon Thames
Fee £175 plus vat
INSIGHTS are limited to about 20 delegates and usually oversubscribed, so early booking is
advised.
To book: visit our website click on ‘Insights booking’ and complete your application online, call (01502)722787 or email [email protected]