Beautifully crafted brochures espousing core values, state-of-the-art videos produced to capture the essence of the place, laborious funding applications, eye-catching websites, cleverly written adverts … the world of education today is a far cry from the schools many of us attended.
From nurseries to universities, the sector has an imperative to present itself in the best possible light – to parents, to students, to local and national government and to investors or sponsors. In both state and private education it’s rare to find a school without a website or prospectus. Some have marketing budgets to rival many cutting-edge businesses.
Underpinning all of this is the written word.
The key point with education copywriting is to be very clear who you are writing for and what the objective of the exercise is.
A bunch of prospective parents are likely to want to read about how you will care for the children and turn them into wonderful adults, the government official will want to understand your results and leadership, a business owner thinking about sponsoring the rebuild of your library will be far more interested in your community links and their return on investment.
Editing Edge have worked on education copywriting projects that couldn’t be more diverse. From business award entries for a private business school in London and an international schools group, to authoring reports on the role of Multi-Academy Trusts, to a poster advertising a chain of nurseries, our job is to get to know how the organisation works by visiting, speaking to key staff and understanding its ethos and how pupils are looked after. We can then produce a plethora of material for all audiences.
For one of our clients, the national childcare group Asquith Nurseries, we wrote website profiles for 81 nurseries across the country. We had to move away from the nursery managers’ terminology – fixed on “attaining Early Years criteria” and “regulatory compliance objectives” – towards copy that appealed to parents. They want reassurance that the nursery is safe and secure, that’s a given, but they respond more enthusiastically to colourful examples of how their child will spend their day. It was demanding but fun to write about the joys of baking biscuits, splodging paint, marching about the garden in wellies and snuggling down with books!
Great copy for me to work with!!! Thank you profusely.
Sarah Pennycook, Marketing Director, Asquith Nurseries
In an overhaul of a convent school’s marketing literature we were tasked with refreshing the image of a school keen to shed any mistaken notion that being a convent made it fusty. We spent a morning there to interview staff and get a feel for the place, and brought a coherent voice to the original copy that had been assembled by the many department heads.
It also helps that Editing Edge director Lesley Hussell is a school governor (of Buriton School in Hampshire), so can see things from an insider’s perspective – an excellent insight into how schools work and what their priorities are.
