This time last week saw our agency engaged in one of the busiest days in its history – GCSE day, which is to our company what Black Friday is to a retailer, writes Simon Burch.
We look after the PR for a number of secondary schools and so last Thursday saw all of our members of staff, including myself, visiting all of our schools to report on how their GCSE students got on.
Education has always been a cornerstone of news coverage, but we get many surprised reactions when we tell people that we work on behalf of schools. Their initial response is mild astonishment that schools might need PR, since they’re not traditional companies reliant on marketing to promote their goods and services.
That’s true, but the advent of giving parents choice on where to send their children means schools must now engage in a marketing campaign to attract pupils, which involves their results, Ofsted rating, the kinds of enriched experiences they offer and their facilities and learning opportunities.
Much of this involves social media content but it also involves getting their stories into the local papers and news websites to get themselves known in their local community (both inside and out of their catchment areas) for all the right reasons.
There is no better opportunity to do that than GCSE (and A Levels) results day, when the media actively go on the hunt for good stories.
This is rare in the educational calendar. Often, the media’s education stories reflect controversy or a school’s failings, perhaps because of a teacher’s conduct or because a new policy has created a problem for parents.
Results day is different. Yes, there is talk about general standards and pass rates and whether the exams are easier, or there is grade inflation, or a structural inequality between public and state schools, but on a human level, the stories focus on the pupils themselves.
This is where PR comes into its own, because you can tell a story in a way an advert can’t manage and an engaging human interest story is immensely powerful in attracting interest.
Inevitably, like all stories, the narrative has to follow a recognised pattern, which is why the most effective and popular GCSE stories are those which resemble the most popular stories in our culture – a tale of someone who triumphs having battled with adversity.
We’ve done plenty of these down the years, including young people who have arrived in the country as refugees, had to learn English in super-quick time and opened up their results envelope to reveal a host of top grades.
In recent years, the COVID lockdown has fuelled stories of students who have had to overcome months of disrupted learning due to lockdowns, while every year there are stories of incredible students who have overcome a serious illness before sitting their exams and excelled themselves.
My colleague Kerry Ganly had one such story this year with Will Barlow, a pupil at Netherthorpe School in Chesterfield, who studied for his GCSEs (and got the grades he needed) while undergoing treatment for a rare form of Hodgkin lymphoma.
It is an excellent achievement from him and made an excellent story, which was later picked up by BBC East Midlands Today, BBC Look North, ITV Central, ITV Calendar, BBC Radio Derby, Derbyshire Times, Derbyshire Live and Derby Telegraph and the i-News.
This is coverage that money simply cannot buy, and why I love PR.
Not only did GCSE day allow us to work like reporters again – getting out and about gathering quotes, stories and pictures – it allows us to celebrate the most important people of all, the students themselves.
Because what I think what most attracts parents to a school isn’t always the exam results, the curriculum or the attendance figures.
It’s how what it does might potentially benefit or impact on their children, how it helps them to aspire, makes them feel happy, safe and fulfilled and puts them in the best place possible to take the next step in their lives, including by helping them to overcome difficulties.
It’s hard to sell that with a general marketing message without sounding trite or inauthentic, but a good, meaningful real-life story that commands widespread attention delivers that in spades – which is why next year we’ll be out and about with our notebooks on GCSE day again, looking for the next good news story to spread the message about our schools.
