Reputation Management:
A New Lens for Girls’ Schools to Stand out from the Crowd

27 April 2024
9-11:30 a.m.

Facilitator: Dr. Stephen Holmes B. ED, MBA, M. ED, PhD — Principal and Founder, The 5Rs Partnership
Target Audience: Heads of School, Boards of Governors, CFOs, Senior Marketing Leaders (learn more about The 5Rs Partnership’s work with schools here)

Overview: The reputation of a girls’ school constitutes its most valuable asset. Yet there is still a genuine lack of robust evidence and coordinated responsibility to build, manage and evaluate this asset that we call reputation and how it can be the key differentiator for girls’ schools operating in competitive contexts as almost all are.

A precondition for reputation is authenticity and creating consistent, pervasive meaning for audiences. For schools, this means alignment between what a school says about itself (Vision, Mission, marketing messages etc.) and what it actually does (education reality).

This half day workshop, based on Dr. Holmes’ three decades of research and consulting with girls’ schools across the world, will present school wide frameworks developed and applied by Dr. Holmes on school reputation development and benchmarking in schools, to inform identity, strategy, and drive distinctive name and acclaim.

This interactive workshop will give ICGS girls’ schools a new and thought-provoking lens (reputation) to overarch effective school management. It will provide robust and proven approaches to shape reputation and synchronously build intent-based meaning in their communities. A school reputation self-assessment using our unique School Reputation Assessor benchmarking tool and recent school case studies on school reputation will also be a feature of the workshop.

Key areas of takeaway will include a clear picture of:

  • What is reputation and its management in a school context?
  • How can school leaders build and enact a compelling mission to drive reputation in a world crying out for optimism?
  • A self-assessment of your school’s reputation.
  • How can reputation be a binding and inclusive concept for all in schools to create unified meaning where other concepts are often siloed or lack connectivity with educators.
  • Fast-track techniques to build reputation and stand out from the crowd.
  • Evidence-based strategies to develop and evaluate your school’s reputation.
  • Internal (staff) and external (parent, student, community) strategies successful schools are using to build reputation.
  • Informed strategies to strengthen staff engagement with and co-ownership of reputation.
  • Word of mouth referral techniques to manage reputation.