Working with the media: can you hack it?

Local media coverage can have a significant impact on how your school is perceived. So is it important to develop a positive relationship with the media? What are the benefits? And what happens when crisis strikes? Jeremy Sutcliffe investigates.

Less than a year into her first headship, Clare Spence picked up the local evening newspaper to find her school labelled as potentially one of the “worst 200” primaries in Britain.

The story named Shelthorpe Community Primary School in Loughborough as a likely candidate for inclusion in a list of primary schools due to be turned into academies after recording poor results in key stage tests over a five-year period.

For Clare and her staff, who had been working hard to implement an action plan to raise standards after Ofsted inspectors visited the school in April 2010 and found pupil attainment and attendance to be inadequate, it was a shattering blow.

“We were highlighted in the Leicester Mercury as being in the list of the 200 weakest schools, which in fact we weren’t, but it was quite detrimental. The effect that had on the community was that we had lots of phone calls from local shops, past parents and past grandparents asking whether we were shutting. That’s how the rumour mill starts and it’s about trying to balance the negative press with the positives,” says Clare.

By the time that story appeared, following an announcement by the Education Secretary in June 2011 that 200 of the weakest primary schools in England were to be converted to academies, the school had already taken radical action to address serious weaknesses identified in its Grade 3 (satisfactory) inspection report. There had been many staff changes and a shake-up of both the senior leadership team and governing body. One key development was the appointment of Clare as headteacher in September 2010 and she immediately set about implementing change.

When the Leicester Mercury story broke, instead of keeping her head down, Clare spoke to the journalist who wrote the story to explain that the school was not failing and was not on the list of 200 schools. Clare also told her that the school’s attainment and attendance data, which were below the national average, were skewed because of its special unit for 30 children with moderate learning difficulties. The journalist apologised.

Clare then took her battle to the House of Commons when her local MP Nicky Morgan raised the issue of schools with special units for children with learning difficulties being unfairly singled out for their low attainment. Shelthorpe was named as an example, resulting in a reporter from Radio Leicester visiting the school to discuss the issues raised.

“It was one of the most difficult interviews I’ve ever done. I was waiting to see what would go onto the radio the following morning and needed just a bit of hand-holding to listen to it because you don’t want to let your school down.

“As a school leader you sometimes have to be brave in order to get your message across, because the information can’t be one-sided. If somebody is saying something about your school that you know is not true, you are the public face of that school. You are the person that’s got to defend the school, the staff, the pupils and the parents because if you don’t stand up to the people who are making those comments about you, who will?”

Her public defence of the school has now been vindicated by an Ofsted monitoring team which reported in November 2011 that the school was making good progress under Clare’s leadership. The report pointed out that Shelthorpe’s efforts to raise attainment and attendance were being “further skewed by the inclusion of results for pupils in the school’s specialist unit”.

Besides being prepared to use the media to get across important messages through the media, Clare believes school leaders need to be open and honest with journalists. She believes developing a positive relationship with reporters and editors can pay dividends, not just in terms of publicity but also to support learning.

“We are using the media more in our lessons, so for example I took our children to Oak FM to promote their enterprise week and summer fair. They came up with a strapline, ‘Shelthorpe School – making things happen’. They also learned about the radio station, what the reach was, who would listen, what time it would go out and how it was recorded. For us it’s about providing experiences for the children as well as promoting the school.”

At a time when more schools are converting to academies and less able to rely on local authority press office support, their ability to handle media enquiries and deal with both good and bad publicity has never been more important. One of the country’s most media-savvy school leaders is David Carter, executive principal of the Cabot Learning Federation, which operates five academies in Bristol and Weston-Super-Mare.

“Press and PR is a critical role for us for three reasons. The most important is to keep our schools’ profile high in the local media. It’s about getting our core messages across,” says David. “Another priority, though less important than when we started, is to balance some of the negative reporting and misconceptions about academies.

“Our third priority is to give our individual academies a profile and to try to get away from the idea that they all have one person spending a couple of hours a week putting out the netball results. We try to ensure the stories are a bit more meaningful and reflect our high aspirations.”

One reason the federation achieves such a high media profile is Dean Blake, its full-time director of communications. Since his appointment two years ago, the academies have invited in ITN and Channel 4 news crews to discuss topical issues such as rising tuition fees with students, and have even appeared in popular television dramas such as Casualty and Skins. Dean’s main role, however, is to develop a good working relationship with journalists and to get positive coverage in the local media.

“When you send out a press release which results in media coverage you are sending out a subliminal message to parents that you have got happy and motivated children and staff,” says Dean.

“My advice is always to be open and honest with the media. Never say ‘no comment’. You can always turn a negative into a positive. If bullying is going on in your school the students will know about it and so will the parents and staff. So there is no point in saying there’s no bullying because you will come unstuck. If you answer the question by saying, ‘Yes, we have had instances of bullying, these are the strategies we have put in place to deal with it and we have seen a measurable reduction in bullying because of those strategies’ – by doing that, you have answered your critics, told them what you are doing about it and your school is benefiting from the improvement.”

Andrew Fielder, executive principal of Sandy Hill Academy in St Austell, Cornwall, and chief executive of the Cornwall Academy Trust, which runs three primary academies in the county, has taken a more cautious approach with the media. Instead of seeking a high profile and inviting the media in, he has opted for a low key, but more direct, form of communication with parents, staff and other stakeholders by using school newsletters and a personal blog.

“We have taken it fairly cautiously. Everything we have done has been through consultation with parents, who have been involved right through all our academy conversions. I had a lot to do with the governors of the three schools and we have communicated through those bodies and have already established means of communication.

“What we don’t want to do is spread huge amounts of concern and alarm which happens if you launch into the media game too soon. What we have aimed to achieve is a seamless transition from three separate schools to one academy chain so that neither the children nor the parents feel any different. What counts is making sure we get the quality in the classrooms.”

Published January 2012