“Academic excellence in a nurturing community.” “Rigorous learning in a supportive environment.” “Outstanding education for every child.”
Every school says it. Every parent has read it.
And yet, I bet you would say that your school is genuinely special. Walk through your classrooms and you’d feel it straight away. Your teachers and families feel it too… that’s why you have strong word-of-mouth, right?
But when it comes to your marketing, communication, enrolment journey, tours, you end up sounding like every other school.
The Feature Trap
Here’s the pattern I see when I start working with a school:
- You’ve looked at what other schools in your market are saying
- You’ve identified what families expect: strong academics, pastoral care, co-curricular breadth, modern facilities
- You’ve articulated how you deliver those things pretty well
- You’ve added some warmth about care and community
- You’ve packaged it with good photography
It makes sense, right? You’re demonstrating that you meet expectations and can hold your own against other local schools.
But here’s what happens: everyone’s doing the same thing. You’re all describing yourselves using the same criteria – the accepted features of what makes a “good school.”
I call this The Feature Trap. You’re competing on dimensions where real differentiation is nearly impossible, because you’re describing what you have rather than what families actually need.
You’re competing on dimensions where real differentiation is nearly impossible, because you’re describing what you have rather than what families need.
What Families Are Respond To
Something’s changing in how families approach school choice, and I don’t think many schools have noticed yet.
Families are starting to expect something different. They don’t want to be sold to. They want to be partnered with.
They’re making one of the biggest decisions of their parental lives, often while anxious and uncertain. They’re trying to answer some seriously difficult questions:
- Will my child actually be happy here?
- Will they notice and support my child’s specific needs?
- Will I regret this decision in two years?
- Will this school help my child become all they could be?
The Real Problem Isn’t Sameness, It’s Decision Overwhelm
When you sound the same as every school around you, you remove the very tool families need most: a clear way to understand how a school can meet their unique needs.
School choice is already one of the hardest decisions parents make. It’s:
- High stakes (affects their child’s entire educational experience)
- Emotionally charged (tied to their hopes and fears as parents)
- Genuinely complex (involves trade-offs they can barely articulate)
- Time-pressured (often with deadlines and limited spots)
And now you’ve made it harder by sound exactly like the school down the road!
Here’s a slightly unsettling truth: Research on school choice suggests parents may not fully understand their own decision-making. In experimental studies where participants chose between hypothetical schools, what they said mattered to them predicted different choices than their actual selections 16-20% of the time.
When families can’t distinguish based on what you’re saying, they don’t suddenly become more rational decision-makers. They become more anxious. They second-guess themselves. They choose based on whatever signal happens to break through the noise, which might be location, or word-of-mouth, or something as small as how quickly you responded to an email. Perhaps most worryingly, they’ll grab onto anything that makes the decision more black-and-white for them. Regardless of its validity or truth.
When everything else sounds the same, any differentiating signal suddenly carries disproportionate weight.
This is the real cost of The Feature Trap. You’re letting families down in the hardest part of their decision-making journey, right when they need guidance most.
Think about what all this means for your role as a school.
- Families are wrestling with practical, emotional and philosophical questions about their child’s education
- If families struggle to articulate what will genuinely lead to a good fit, then you have a responsibility to help them think it through more clearly.
- Your carefully crafted value proposition might be less important than whether someone felt dismissed or heard on a phone call, especially if your value proposition sounds the same as the other three local schools
This is the real cost of The Feature Trap. You’re letting families down in the hardest part of their decision-making journey, right when they need guidance most.
Schools Need to Become a Guide
If you want your school to have cut-through in your local area, then the solution isn’t to double-down on features at the expense of all else. Instead, consider the responsibility you have to act as a guide to help families think through their education decision more clearly.
That means:
- Helping them understand what actually thrives here versus elsewhere
- Pointing out considerations they might not have thought about
- Being honest about fit even when it costs you an enrolment
- Designing touchpoints that build clarity, not just move them forward
This is fundamentally different way of thinking about marketing.
How to Assess Your Own Approach
Here are five helpful questions to work out whether your enrolment promise is built on features or on understanding needs:
- Does your promise describe what you offer, or what families experience?
- What would need to be true for you to tell a family “I don’t think we’re the right fit for you”?
- If you observed your own tour without knowing anything about your school, what would you conclude the school values?
- Can your admissions team explain your difference without defaulting to features?
- When families don’t choose you, what do they say is the reason – and what do you think is the real reason?
How To Stand Out from Other Schools
If you’re thinking “this matters but I don’t know where to start,” this is where it gets practical.
Shifting from feature-based promises (The Feature Trap) to need-anticipating experiences isn’t just a messaging exercise. It’s a systems change. And we think about that system through The Enrolment Journey Ecosystem:
The Enrolment Journey Ecosystem
The Infrastructure Layer
This is where most schools start (and finish). They redo the website, rewrite the prospectus, refresh the brand. And it looks better. But if the underlying thinking is still “showcase our features,” you’ve just made the same approach look prettier.
The Journey Layer
This is how your teams organise their work: the stages, handoffs, measures of success.
In order to deliver the kinds of experiences that compel families to enrol, you need seamless internal approaches. That means shared language, no more marketing/admissions siloes, and clear processes and procedures.
The Experience Layer
This is every moment families actually feel – emails, phone calls, tours, conversations.
Schools anticipating needs design experiences to meet families wherever they are: “What does this family need right now, regardless of what stage we think they’re in?”
What This Actually Looks Like: A New & Improved School Tour
When all three layers work together, your promise and your reality start to align.
Rather than show you quick before/after comparisons of websites, emails, and tours, let me go deep on one: your school tour.
Note: Take off your ‘logistics’ hat and imagine with me for moment…
The Feature-Focused Tour
Most school tours follow a familiar pattern:
You gather families in the library or auditorium. You welcome them warmly and talk about the school’s history, values, and achievements. Then you walk a set route:
- Stop at the science labs: “Our new STEM facilities opened last year and include…”
- Pass by the performing arts centre: “We have a strong arts program with…”
- Past the sports facilities: “Our teams regularly compete at…”
You explain programs. You showcase spaces. You highlight achievements. The tour leader is excellent at presenting the school. Families see impressive facilities and hear about strong offerings.
There is nothing inherently wrong about this approach. Hopefully you have provided enough information to meet families needs. Hopefully the school down the road doesn’t also have new STEM facilities…
The Need-Anticipating Tour
Now imagine approaching it differently. When the family arrives, before you start walking, you say:
“We’ve scheduled an hour together, but how we spend it should depend on what you’re actually trying to work out. Some families at this point are trying to understand our approach to learning. Others are wondering about how we support specific needs. Some are trying to get a sense of whether their child would feel at home here. What would be most helpful for you today?”
Listen to what they say. Then design the tour around their actual questions.
If they want to understand your approach to learning, let them observe a real lesson. Point out specific teaching moments. Explain the thinking behind what they’re seeing.
If they’re worried about whether their child will fit in socially, spend time in spaces where you can observe students actually interacting with each other. Maybe you could swing past the wellbeing block and meet the school chaplain, who often helps kids settle in when they first start.
If their child has specific learning needs, consider facilitating a conversation directly with your learning support team.
Throughout the tour, you’re helping families feel what their child’s daily reality would be.
Here’s what might surprise you: Sometimes this means pointing out things that aren’t impressive. “This building is older and we know we need to update it.” Or being honest about challenges: “We’re strong academically but if your daughter needs extensive arts facilities, you should know [school across town] has more to offer there.”
When families leave, they don’t think “impressive school.” They think one of two things:
“I can genuinely picture my child here. I understand what their days would be like.”
Or: “I’m grateful for how honest they were. I don’t think this is the right fit.”
Both of these outcomes are successful.
The first because you’ve built genuine confidence. The second because you’ve helped them eliminate a poor-fit option so they can focus on better matches. They’ll remember and respect that honesty, and might just become a future advocate of your school, even as a non-attender.
What This Actually Requires
I won’t pretend this shift is straightforward. It takes more than updating your materials.
It means:
Getting honest about the gap
What do families actually experience versus what you intend them to experience? This often means talking to families who chose elsewhere and asking them what their journey felt like.
Building different capabilities in your team
Your admissions staff need to be able to read what families actually need in the moment and adapt accordingly. That’s harder than following a script or process. It requires training and ongoing development.
Creating infrastructure that enables flexibility
Your systems need to support staff in meeting families where they are, not force them through rigid steps. That might mean rethinking your CRM, your email sequences, your tour structure.
Measuring different outcomes
Instead of conversion rate, you might track: Did families report feeling clear about fit? Are we attracting families who succeed here? How many families say the process helped them regardless of their final decision?
Being willing to guide families elsewhere
This is perhaps the hardest shift. When a family isn’t the right fit, saying so directly. Not because you don’t need the enrolment (you probably do), but because genuine partnership requires honesty.
But here’s what could happen if you’re willing to make the change:
For families
They make this enormous decision with confidence rather than anxiety. They choose you because you’re genuinely right for their child, not because your marketing was most polished. And families you guide elsewhere tell other families about your integrity.
For your team
They stop burning out on conversion pressure and start doing work that feels aligned with why they’re in education. Marketing and admissions work together naturally because they’re oriented toward the same goal.
For your school
You attract better-fit families who stay. You reduce early attrition. You differentiate in ways competitors can’t easily copy. You build sustainable growth rather than enrolment spikes followed by dips.
The schools that make this shift don’t just get better enrolment outcomes. They build fundamentally healthier relationships with their communities, based on genuine understanding rather than polished promises.
Where to Start
If you’re thinking “we need to look at this,” here’s what I’d suggest:
- Audit your current approach using the five questions above. Get marketing and admissions in a room together. Be honest about what you find.
- Talk to recent families – both those who chose you and those who didn’t. Ask them about their experience of the decision itself, not just what they thought of your programs. Listen for emotion and confusion, not just positive feedback.
- Map the gaps between what your journey currently delivers and what families actually need. Look across all three layers: Infrastructure, Journey, and Experience.
- Start with one critical moment where the gap is most obvious. Don’t try to fix everything at once. Pick the touchpoint where families are most anxious or confused, and redesign just that moment around what they need.
- Build your team’s capability to think this way. This isn’t about scripts or templates. It’s about helping your people understand how to read what families need and adapt accordingly.
The schools that make this shift don’t just get better enrolment outcomes. They build fundamentally healthier relationships with their communities, based on genuine understanding rather than polished promises.
And that foundation matters more and more as family expectations keep evolving.
If you’re recognising your school in this and want to understand your specific gaps, we should talk. At Bolsta Education, we work with schools to diagnose where your enrolment promise and your actual journey disconnect, and to design and build the infrastructure, journeys and experiences that close those gaps in ways your team can sustain.