Are School Marketers the Philosophers of Education?

“School marketing exists to grow the school.” More enrolments, more revenue, more resources. That’s the brief. It’s been the brief for as long as schools have competed for students, and it’s a reasonable one.

But the values schools want to communicate (belonging, care, human flourishing, character formation) sit uncomfortably inside that growth frame. You can talk about community in the prospectus while running a CRM pipeline that reduces families to conversion targets. You can write “every child is known” on the website while your enrolment process is designed primarily to extract information and rank enquiries.

These things coexist. The tension is real, and the people who feel it most acutely tend to be the ones writing the copy.

Education as a commons

I’ve been thinking about this since hearing the commons scholar David Bollier, on the Future Learning Design podcast, reframe education as a commons: a set of relationships a community sustains together, rather than a product consumed in a marketplace.

Schools do operate in a market. In Australia especially, that’s not a metaphor. Families compare. Schools compete. Funding follows enrolment. I’m not pretending otherwise.

But the market frame is one way of seeing education, and for decades it’s been the dominant one: schools as products, parents as consumers, success measured by economic output. That dominance is shifting. There is a growing discomfort with schools operating competitively. The OECD is reframing education around human flourishing. Schools themselves are reaching for language (belonging, care, character) that the consumer model can’t contain.

School choice doesn’t happen in a neutral marketplace. Anxiety, identity, geography, and trust press on the decision long before fees or facilities do.

The market exists. The question is whether schools want to let market logic be the only frame available to the people doing this work, and whether there’s something better to look toward.

A contradiction baked into its own name

If education isn’t fundamentally a market, then the marketing function inside a school faces a contradiction baked into its own name. The logic it inherited (competitive positioning, enrolment growth, brand differentiation) pulls against the things the school says it cares about. The frame doesn’t fit the work it’s increasingly being asked to do.

Starting from a different question

With Bolsta Education, I’ve been trying to build something that starts from a different question: what if the work isn’t to grow the school, but to help the school become more honestly itself, and trust that the right families will find it?

That’s a harder sell, of course. But it’s also, I think, a more honest one.

The storytellers are already in the building

Philosophical shifts in education need popular storytellers. The people who know how to shape narrative, choose language carefully, and design an emotional arc that lands with a real person making a real decision: those people are already in schools. They’re in the marketing office. The comms team. The registrar’s desk. They’re the ones deciding, sentence by sentence, how a school presents itself to the world.

Imagining a world where school marketing stops and school storytelling begins

It could look like a marketing manager who stops writing “places are filling fast” and starts writing about what belonging looks like at their school. A registrar who redesigns the tour to help families notice whether they fit. A comms team that speaks to families to understand what is resonating with their lived experience.

I think there’s a version of school marketing that is philosophical work, in the practical sense: narrating what a school believes, how its practices match those beliefs, and telling that story honestly to families who are anxious and hoping someone can help them choose well.

The people trained in storytelling and messaging are well positioned to do this. They sit at the intersection of what a school says and what a school is. They see the gaps. They feel the tension between the brand and the playground. And they have the skills, if given the permission and the frame, to close that gap by pushing the institution to become more coherent.

The shift that matters

Some of this is what Experience Builder™ is for: giving these people a language for examining what an experience actually is, before deciding how to communicate it. But the tool is secondary to the shift. The shift depends on whether schools are willing to treat their marketing function as a site for honest inquiry rather than promotional output.

The marketing professionals who take this seriously might find they’re doing the most important work in the school.

They might also find they’re the least recognised for it.

I’m not sure how to resolve that. But I think it’s worth some reflection.