Dear school leaders: Your school is worth celebrating

Leading a school is undeniably a hard job, and a strange one at times. You’re pulled in several directions at once: expectations from the board and the system above you, from staff and families below, pressure to keep things steady and pressure to be seen growing. You’re a career educator, and now – in many ways – a CEO. The buck stops with you.

So it makes sense that school leaders tend to be careful about who gets near the things that matter most: the story, the language, the way the school community is spoken to and held. The leaders I’ve worked with tend to carry a real pride in shepherding their school.

Alongside the caution, I almost always see aspiration. A wish to build something, grow it, see certain things take root, do the work well and see staff and students flourishing.

That tension, between protecting what’s precious and reaching for what’s possible, is where I see school leaders living.

I spoke with a school leader once, who told me “at the end of the day, I want to see two things out of our marketing and communication: to celebrate and honour the good work being done in our school, and to care for our families.”

A school pours enormous effort into teaching, into culture, into the small daily care of children and families. That work deserves to be told well, and told truthfully. Done right, this isn’t marketing your school so much as making sure the story a family encounters honours what your staff, students and families actually experience.

Caring for a community means carrying some anxiety about getting it right. And getting it right is harder than it looks. You are closer to your school than anyone, and being that close makes it hard to see the way a family does. It works a little like a magician who knows the trick: once you know how it’s done, you can’t feel what the audience feels. Your school sits so far inside its own values, language, story, rhetoric, that it’s hard to tell how much of them reaches a family through the website, the phone call, the tour.

And further, as I alluded to earlier, school leaders usually come up as educators and then find themselves running an organisation, effectively its chief executive. That’s a hard place to stand. The story, the experience, how a school comes across, all ask for instincts a teaching career doesn’t always hand you, including the harder job of telling what’s helpful from what isn’t.

I’d like school leaders to feel they don’t have to do this part alone.

The family on the other side isn’t in the dark, exactly. Research shows parents struggle to say how they actually choose a school, and that the reasons they give often aren’t the actual reasons. But they aren’t clueless. They know what they want, in human terms: a safe place for their child, somewhere their kid can thrive. And they know, quickly, when they’re being listened to and when they aren’t, when the school they were promised matches the one they’re living, and when it doesn’t.

That last gap is something Bolsta has been built to address. Our aim isn’t to help schools script how families should feel from the top down. It’s the opposite: to listen, to reflect, and to leave families room to bring their own experience to the table. From that openness, we help schools shape language, stories and experiences that ring true: true enough that families, students and staff can find themselves in them and add their own.

If it sounds scary to ‘hand over the reins’ to the voices of your community, it helps to remember what a parent is choosing. A decision that might run fifteen years, cost as much as a house, for their most prized possession. Families – goodness, humans – want to be known. They want to feel heard. They want to be connected and made to feel a part of something. It starts with a story told and experience delivered that welcome them into this kind of relationship.

This is where Bolsta works with you: First, getting the promise right, with you, so that what your school says about itself is true and yours, drawn out of your community rather than written at it. Then helping you keep that promise in the experience a family actually has, from the first enquiry through the tour and well past enrolment. The promise and its delivery, treated as one piece of work.

None of this is inherently a marketing problem, which is why the usual fixes, agency engagements, marketing hires, can disappoint. A lot of what gets filed under marketing, the messaging, the brand, the communications, is community work in disguise. Done well, it leans on story and experience rather than pushing a message. It gives families, students and staff room to tell their own stories, and draws the threads between them, so the school reads as one place rather than scattered parts.

This is a tradition as old as human history. Story has been the connective tissue of human culture for millennia.

And at the same time, it is new ground. Designing the story and experience of a school, on purpose, is an emerging craft, closer to a discipline than a checklist, even though what it deals in is deeply human.

What if your school gave this the same seriousness it gives teaching and learning?

Which points at a reframe I’d offer you, as a school leader. The way your school communicates, and the experiences it designs, aren’t a bolt-on to the real work. They sit alongside your other important strategic initiatives – your pedagogy, risk and compliance, administrative structures, wellbeing policies – as a pillar in their own right.

If I had to put it in one line: your school is worth experiencing, and the job is to help families feel that, not talk them into it.