It has never been more important to know what parents think of your school or college. Pressure on family budgets, exacerbated by the recession, is making parents much more pragmatic in their educational choices. And the prospect of heightened competition from a radically reformed state sector will further emphasise the need for schools to have regular and accurate intelligence from buyers and potential buyers.
Most schools marketing professionals now appreciate the value of regular parental opinion surveys, ideally undertaken online via a secure website. Digital technology makes regular sampling of parental opinion, whether through entry or exit surveys, regular surveying of specific school years, or whole-school questionnaires, a much more cost-effective exercise for schools of all types. mtmconsulting offers a full range of parental survey options.
But how to interpret the results? How do the findings from your parents stack against those from other schools? How concerned should you be if your parents give you, on a satisfaction scale of 1-5, only an average of 4.1 for school discipline? Should you make this a priority for attention or uprate it on your regular risk analysis review?
The answer is to judge the score against a benchmark. The responses to standard questions in surveys are added to an ever-growing database of results, permitting an increasingly reliable scale against which to assess the significance of your own parental opinion. So, taking the sample above, it should be reasonably reassuring to find that the benchmark score from recent mtmconsulting surveys is 3.9.
So far, so conventional. mtm has now taken this process a stage further. Gauging priorities for your own school is a matter not only of how low the satisfaction score is for a given factor, relative to the all-school benchmark, but also relative to the degree of importance assigned to that factor by your parents.
The mtmconsulting Priority Index, available now in school parent surveys, calibrates both the importance assigned to various factors by parents when choosing your school and their current rating of the school’s performance on each factor. This index score gives you a clear guide to priorities for attention on a scale of 1-25: the higher the score, the more likely it is that parents are, or are likely to become, seriously dissatisfied with the school.
What’s more, the Priority Index itself can be benchmarked. So you will be able to see, for example, that although your own parents are giving you a relatively high priority warning over school communications this may be a relatively common feature of all school surveys. That’s not to say that you won’t still want to do something about communications but it will give you the comfort of knowing you are dealing with an issue common to many schools. The upshot is that our online surveys are now likely to form an even more crucial part of your school or college’s overall education strategy.
mtm's new Priority Index makes understanding parental sentiment even easier
mtmconsulting is the UK leader in strategies for schools and colleges. Our work includes parental and stakeholder research, catchment area analysis for schools, and marketing and pupil recruitment support for our clients.
Alongside individual client projects we also undertake regular sector wide research publications, which are available to purchase or download free.
For more details about how mtm may be able to support your school or college’s growth please contact mtmconsulting here.
Independent school heads, bursars and marketing managers may also wish to be aware of mtm’s forthcoming independent school strategy conference, held at the Institute of Directors on Pall Mall on September 14th. For more details about this conference, or to book tickets, please click here for an order form.
