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Management
and
Marketing |
of
Schools |
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21 Century Education and School |
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About
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Marketing and Markets
Marketing is too often thought of as a single event or as a series of
techniques and approaches. This causes those responsible for
marketing to engage (mistakenly) in reactive responses
without a clear framework for action. To avoid this it is
important to take a wider perspective on marketing within
the context of a view of the school's development...More
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Why should schools market themselves?
The need to market a school centers around both the communication of the
education offered and the attraction and retention of
pupils. Schools often believe that virtue brings its own
reward but to be effective, as we move into twenty-first
century, it is not enough simply to be a good school. What
is also important is that the school is perceived as being a
good one. The quote could be rewritten as: Virtue does not
bring its own reward, but virtue with a good marketing
strategy may! Whatever the positive attributes of a school,
they will not, of themselves, ensure continued success and
survival unless the wider community knows about, understands
and, above all, values them...More
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To whom are schools marketing?
If marketing schools centers on a concept of effective communication,
then it is vital to have a clear view of the target
audience. A simplistic view would be to look only at the
immediate recipients of the school's work the parent and
child, especially when one considers the implications of
formula funding and open enrolment...More
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What are schools marketing?
The discussion, which follows, is not just about the various
values and attainments, which a school puts across; it takes
a different view, examining the significance of both overt
and covert performance indicators. Many schools fail these
are significant factors, especially at secondary level, but
the reputation of a school is made up of a series of complex
and inter-related factors. Wearing school uniform, which
parents associate with good discipline, and the amount of
homework, which they associate with academic standards, can
be very significant. The reputation of many schools may be
enhanced by the overt reality of good staff relationships
and high academic standards. However, this reputation can be
undone by the behavior of pupils in the local town at
lunchtime or when traveling on school buses and the pupils
smoking outside the school gates. These determinants of the
perceptions which parents have of the school are often more
important than the reality of what is actually going on in
the delivery of effective education...More
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Misconception about marketing
There are various misconceptions about marketing in the educational
world:
Marketing is merely about promoting
Very often schools see marketing as designing a new school prospectus or
a new sign.
These promotional activities are, in fact, only part of the
process of marketing. What is more important is that schools
realize that the staff, and all those involved whit the
school, should understand the nature and scope of marketing
as a concept. One of the central concerns of marketing is
quality. The marketing of schools involves finding out what
the clients want and need and then designing a product and
service that provides a quality education to meet those
wants and needs...More
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The process of marketing
Marketing is too often thought of as a single event or as a series of
techniques and approaches. Marketing should not be
considered as an individual event but as a process that is
part of an overall management strategy. Brent Davies and
Linda Ellison (1997, p. 18) consider that there are three
main phases to this marketing process, each with its own
subsections.
One of the potential failures of marketing in schools is to start at
implementation rather than to follow the cyclical process as
outlined above and another is to fail to realize the
significance of the inter-relationships between each of the
phases...More
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The
Importance of the Client
Before, was discussed client identification in education, examining the
pupil/parent relationship and the concept of the wider
community as a client of the school. The way that clients
have been perceived by schools to date may be considerably
different from the way that a commercial or industrial
company would regard a client. While in the business world
the idea of being client orientated or of 'putting the
customer first' is commonplace, such an attitude can seem
somewhat out of place in education. The culture of schools
has traditionally centered on their being the source of
knowledge and their transmitting this knowledge to a captive
audience. The result has been a product-orientation where
knowledge and skills have predominated. However, much can be
learned from commerce and industry. Raising these issues and
applying some of the business concepts can provide a useful
stimulus to the educational debate concerning the ways in
which we think about clients...More
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Linking Marketing to Strategy
The growth of institutional autonomy with its
associated responsibility for planning has been an
international phenomenon within education over the last
decade. The delegation of management responsibility has been
but one element in the creation of quasi markets (Barlett
and Le Grand, 1993) by governments is per suit of a range of
political goals. This has been a shift in the nature of
accountability in schools and colleges. The traditional
emphasis on professional accountability (accountability to
the profession of teaching and its self-established values
and aims) has been replaced by both increasing political
accountability and market accountability. Schools and
colleges have been caught in the middle of an ideological
struggle within right-wing administrations between, on the
one hand, libertarian ideologies emphasizing the concepts of
choice and individualism, the reduction of government
'control' and the removal of the perceived protectionism of
professionalism in state services and, on the other hand,
conservative ideologies emphasizing strong central
control...More
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Marketing in further education
Marketing has become a major preoccupation of FE institutions in the
period since incorporation (post 1992). Strategic planning
is a key requirement within the funding formula, and this is
expected to reflect a college's response to the market. In
large colleges a substantial marketing function has been
developed with specialist marketing teams, while in smaller
colleges the inclusion of marketing within wider remits of
middle and senior managers in more common. Research into
marketing in FE has examined both organizational and
functional aspects of practice (Smith et al., 1995;
Foskett and Hesketh, 1996; Pieda, 1996), and number of
patterns can be identified...More
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Creating a pro active Staff
This remains one of the major challenges in schools. Teachers are by
definition concerned primarily with teaching children. While
there has always been an accountability dimension to schools
in that there has always been a need to communicate what
they are doing and the quality of the process, this has been
given increased importance by two factors:
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The establishment of framework to
judge school performance in terms of the national curriculum
and standardized assessment; and
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The operation of pupil number-led
formula funding linked to open enrolment.
As was mentioned before, to a certain extent educationalists have let
others dictate the educational agenda because of their own
reticence. How can leaders and managers in schools develop
characteristics in staff to make them more pro-active in
articulating the school's vision, values and achievements?
Crego and Schifrin in their book, Customer Centred
Reengineering (1995, p78) list what they call the 'Seven
Cs' as a way of effecting the reengineering type of change
that would be necessary in schools to create a more
pro-active staff...More
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Marketing in schools
The extent of research on marketing in schools reflects a preoccupation
with demand-side issues, and in particular with parental
choice (e.g. Carroll and Walford, 1997). However, the
research of Foskett (1995), Gewirtz et al. (1995),
James and Phillips (1995) and Glatter et al. (1996)
identifies the relatively undeveloped stategization of
secondary schools in relation to the market. They have
identified the following:
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A highly variable interpretation
of 'marketing', with a strong 'product- centered'
philosophy as teachers and managers 'struggle to
reconceptualise an alien concept' (Foskett, 1996, p.39).
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An ad hoc approach to
marketing, with an emphasis on project marketing rather
than strategic marketing.
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A perception of marketing as a
crisis management approach to short-term recruitment
changes, using 'superficial and short-term solution to
problems even when in the long term such strategies may be
socially and educationally unhelpful' (Gewirtz, et al.,
1995, p. 157).
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The absence of any coherent form
of marketing research.
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A slow cultural shift towards
accepting (pragmatically, but not necessarily
philosophically) the role of the market...More
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