English: Marketing Management in Schools

Publisher: The National in-service Teacher Training Centre, Warsaw, Poland, 2003.

No. of pages: 164.

About the Book: The attitude of society towards education is changing. Parents demand “evidence” from schools and perceive education as an investment in the future of their children.

The Polish education system has been hit hard recently by a dramatic drop of enrolment due to demographic circumstances. Public funding is no longer the ultimate source of school finance. Parents are very sensitive about the quality of education and exert pressure on headmasters to “deliver results”.

Poland became part of the European Union on 1, May 2004. The EU stresses the importance of developing a knowledge-based economy by pursuing the Lisbon Strategy. The Strategy aims to create, within Europe, the most competitive knowledge-based economy in the world.

“Marketing management in schools” is an attempt to provide practical, hands-on knowledge for the Polish educators which combines good management practices, operations management in service organisations, quality control, intellectual capital management, and marketing.

The reader will find answers to such questions as:

• How to attract students?
• How to increase the morale of teachers?
• How to engage parents into school-life?
• How to acquire more funding through sponsoring, advertising and other marketing techniques?

The book has been divided onto eight chapters:

Chapter One: Polish Schools in the Knowledge-based Economy

This chapter describes the macroeconomic context in which today’s schools operate.

Keywords: knowledge based economy, service sector, knowledge-based society, and school reform.

Chapter Two: School as a Service Organisation

The theory of Services Marketing provides a wide array of useful concepts which can help to understand the internal processes in schools. Rendering educational services is complex. Services are intangible, bodiless, perishable and abstract. Intangible components are the most important competitive factors in education. “Marketing management in Schools” is based on three pillars: human resources management, quality management, and marketing. Each of these three components are reflected in the structure of a school’s intellectual capital, respectively in human capital, organisational capital, and market capital

Keywords: service characteristics, knowledge as the key component of educational services, concept of tacit knowledge, intellectual capital, human capital, organisational capital and market capital.

Chapter Three:  Human Resources Management

The teacher is an integral part of the school’s services. One cannot plan ahead without thorough consideration of the staff structure and its quality.

Keywords: teacher personality, job satisfaction, motivating teachers, the role of money in motivation, empowerment, organising team work, traps of educational tradition, informal networks, and social network analysis.

Chapter Four: Quality Management in Schools

The specific characteristics of education require a unique approach towards quality management. There is a long time lag between the cause and effect in education. It sometimes takes years to fully evaluate the quality of the educational process.

Keywords: Quality circles and “vicious quality circles” in education, defining quality in education, “painless education”—a marketing dilemma, cultural barriers for quality programmes in schools, the myth of customer satisfaction, managing quality—the Gap model, Servqual, moments of truth, handling quality complaints, services characteristics, behavioural science and quality management, TQM, ISO standards in schools.

Chapter Five: Introduction to Schools Marketing

Marketing schools has recently become popular. The bad reputation of marketing makes its proliferation in schools difficult. In order to achieve meaningful results the teachers need to take a marketing mindset by understanding the ABC of marketing thought.

Keywords: Facts and myths of marketing, relationship marketing, the six markets, market segmentation, the cycle of activity, increasing customers’ loyalty, measuring customer satisfaction, marketing planning.

Chapter Six: Promoting Schools

Schools need to acquire a marketing mindset. This includes active communication with external audiences. Promoting a school requires professional knowledge about the most appropriate methods.

Keywords: Direct and indirect communication, choosing the correct wording, world-of mouth communication, publicity, school trips for parents, writing letters/e-mails to parent, designing advertising material.

Chapter Seven: Marketing in Schools

Schools and children are becoming an attractive market segment for advertisers not only in the USA but also in Europe. Commercial organisations use different methods to capture the attention of the young. Teachers should be aware of this growing trend and be able to exercise active policy against it.

Keywords: Commercial activities within the school’s precinct, marketing activities targeted at teachers and headmasters, the ethical aspects of marketing in schools.

Chapter Eight:  Case Studies: Schools Marketing

In this chapter the reader is able to re-examine his knowledge on marketing management in schools by examining case studies from selected schools in Poland, the USA and Great Britain.

The book (in Polish) can be purchased at www.codn.edu.pl/sklep