Why Schools Must Now Market to Teachers | Bonus clip

**Kai Vacher** (0:00)
If enough teachers get a really good, strong personal brand, aren't schools gonna be looking for teachers rather than teachers looking for schools? There's an innovative, creative thought to leave you with. Any thoughts on that provocation?

**Mark Leppard** (0:15)
It's really interesting, Kai, because we're just redoing our website, and we're talking about our marketing strategy. And we're saying, who are we marketing to? So we're fortunate, and I don't want to come across arrogant, but we're fortunate that we're oversubscribed. So we don't need, and this isn't that we don't sell our stories, but we don't need to put things in the newspaper for students to see.
We use our own parents. We tell lots of stories to our parents so that when they're sitting around a dinner table with other parents from other schools, they're hearing because we think that's our audience. That's who we want to get. We're not worried about that, but our recruitment one is a really different one because we've got to market globally because teachers are very transient.
The information out there, people are far more transient today. So we do put a lot of effort into our marketing, but we market through our stories of the school, of what we're doing and the success of our students, success of our staff. We market that our leadership teams speak of conferences. So we try to give a really authentic story of the school. So we are trying to put ourselves out there and our biggest marketing, I think, outside of going to our own parents and telling the great stories about their children in school, is for future prospective teachers. That is where we target it. When we put stories out, we say, someone could be picking this up in Argentina thinking they want to head over to the Middle East and it's the teacher market. We really need to try and capture. Because of that, going back to the very start, that potential shortage is out there for us.

**Kai Vacher** (1:59)
So, if I was then asking tips for schools, it sounds like your tip for a school, Mark, would be you need to really think carefully about how you're marketing yourself, not only to your prospective parents, but to the global education workforce and how you're continuing to make BSAC the school of choice in Abu Dhabi.

**Mark Leppard** (2:19)
Absolutely. You can't stop and say you've hit the perfect note for that time and carry on doing it. Particularly now with the generations, there's a lot of things, and this isn't to patronize, there's a lot of things that are short clips, short feed. You can't have ultra long stories, you can't have the same story going for one month. Where before, as you said, every week there was a publication, and the next time you see it, it's a week later.
You've got to keep things flowing, that people think, wow, that's vibrant, that's interesting, and what's going to pique my interest? So it's hard work.

**Laura Rigney** (2:53)
I'm just about to agree with what Mark said, that OECD said that creativity was going to be one of the biggest skills needed for 2030 So where I was talking about teachers being creative and short form dominance, taking the lead in social media, being able to market themselves, schools also need to do the same thing. So recruitment videos can be really great, they can be quite long, but if they can be snappy and short and schools can get on to the main platforms, social media and put themselves out there.
Another thing we're doing at Teacher Horizons is developing a community networking system which would be really good for teachers to be able to contact other teachers in a country that maybe they hadn't considered before and just have a chat about little things like how is it with pets or can you recommend a sports club I can join in the city? Things like that. I think in a very human driven world like education, try to connect on a human level with all the different people that teachers and leaders.

**Kai Vacher** (3:43)
Okay, Leisa Grace, to finish yourself.

**Leisa Grace Wilson** (3:46)
Yeah, so I agree with what Mark said about how you market yourself and marketing yourself to the teachers to see whether or not you're an attractive option for them because they have to choose you as much as you're choosing them. I remember I did a podcast with Mark a few years ago and on that podcast, he was like, oh, we don't have emails at a certain hour, we make sure we leave school at a certain hour from that podcast. My podcast got several thousand views, right? The amount of people that contacted me and went, do you know him personally? Can I give you my CV to cue him? And I was like, no, I cannot do that, that's not within our remit. We can't do that. But that's a great example, actually. When he was talking, I was like, I wonder if he knows that that's what had happened from that episode.