The first thing that comes to our mind when thinking about customer acquisition is the term “Marketing”. When it comes to schools, it is not the best way to go about, especially if you are running a preschool for more than a few years. Rather than looking at ways to market your preschool, you should be looking to spread the word of mouth by offering better results. And by results, I don’t mean students scoring better marks in the exams.
Schools should focus on building a better learning environment for their students and make them capable of succeeding in the real world. Once the parents see the first batch of students learning new things and quickly, they will become your sales executives. The conversion rates sky rocket when your customers become your sales executives.
In this article we tell you about methods you could use to differentiate from other preschools in order to increase admission in school without marketing.
We have been following an education system that has been around for centuries. While we all agree that it has been quite successful considering the innovation we have seen over the past few decades, one can still debate on whether it could be better.
We all agree that Artificial Intelligence has been taking away jobs because it has started to get more reliable and efficient. In the future, kids studying in schools will have to compete with AI and humans in order to succeed.
Are we doing enough to make sure that our children are ready to face this competition and will they be able to build a better future for themselves?
Introduce New Age Morals and Values
Apart from language, stories are also a medium to teach kids about social skills and provide them an understanding of morals and values that are globally accepted. However, we are still relying on stories like Cinderella and others of such sort that are not relevant in the world we live in today.
Moreover, almost all stories we hear today have two characters, a good one and a bad one. Such approach to stories have a very deep impact on a child’s mind and the little one will become judgemental about the character in the negative role. This impact will lead them to believe that all characters related to the one in the negative role are bad. It is probably not the best way to teach kids at this young age.
So, if morals are not relevant and there are no good or bad characters, how can we make a story interesting?
- Stories should have morals that are adopted from the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals 2030.
- Tell children about why the various characters do what they do and let them decide what is right and what is wrong.
- Make story sessions more interactive by allowing them to play with the characters that are a part of the story.
- Enable them to visualise the story telling session to make it more engaging and ensure that the values are being transferred successfully.
Develop Unique Ways of Learning
Books for stories, books for activities, books for fun and books for play. Even the sentence sounds boring, which is why kids should be given more opportunities / methods to learn. Some children like reading books, some other learn by listening to teachers, some might learn by watching videos and some others learn by engaging themselves in physical activities.
As an educationalist, it is our responsibility to make sure that every child has the opportunity to achieve academic excellence. This can only be achieved by providing a child the opportunity to learn in a way that she can learn best. Plenty of preschools are now focusing more and more on activity oriented and theme based learning.
Even technology can help improve the way kids are learning these days. Books don’t provide any kind of feedback on actions performed by little ones but technology can. A tablet or a smartphone will provide feedback through the audio as a voice over and visually through animations. It also engages children who learn by performing physical activities.
If you would like to introduce learning powered by tech, you must check out solutions like the BubbleBud Kids Universefor kids to engage with at home and The UlterioRoom that compliments a teacher’s approach in the classrooms with the help of interactive simulation experiences.
Encourage Creativity and Innovation
In order to stay relevant in the future, creativity is the key. It is probably the only way kids will be able to survive the stiff competition against AI. While there are plenty of preschools that are encouraging creativity and play, there are still many that are following outdated practices when it comes to a child’s education.
Schools should become more human by finding out ways to encourage creativity and move on from the image of being factories that produce engineers and doctors. The future is going to need more artists than ever. By artists, we don’t mean painters, but people who can really think out of the box and bring new ideas to the table in order to reduce effort and improve productivity.
Make the Most of Digital Learning Tools
Technology has become the food for your brain, isn’t it? You are always learning something new each day by consuming technology. It is the same for young ones. With whatever little time they spend with technology, they are learning something new. There are multiple reasons why technology has been able to achieve this, and one foremost reason is the fact that technology enables a way for us to visualise and interact with content like never before.
With the hep of interactive tools and new technologies like Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality, it has now become possible for us to engage students in learning activities in the classroom and at home.
Imagine you are teaching the kids about the Steam Engine in the classroom with the help of an image in the book. If you are an excellent teacher, you might be sure that 70% of the class understood the topic well. Now, we replace the book with a simulated steam engine that the kids can interact with and explore its functionalities under your guidance. It is guaranteed that this time, the acceptance and understanding of the topic will be as close to 100% as it could get.
Engage Parents in Child’s Learning Journey
No matter how hard you try, ultimately, the kid will be a good learner only if the parents are actively involved in the child’s learning journey. That is a tough nut to crack in this world where usually both the parents are working and have very little time for their little ones.
There is no reason to be disheartened, as there is always a very simple solution even to the toughest problems we face. Just like we are trying to make learning more interesting for kids, as an educationalist we should make learning about their kid more interesting for parents.
The first thing we must do is to make sure that the parents are kept updated about their child’s performance on a daily basis. This doesn’t necessarily mean that teachers must write out short briefs about what the child has been upto each day. It can be as simple as a smiley that will give the parents a quick overview of how the child had done in the class on that day. On a longer term, the parent teacher meetings make a huge difference.
Who likes listening to lectures and even worse if they are about criticising the capabilities of their little ones? In order to make parents more interested in their child’s learning journey we must make parent teacher interactions more exciting than ever. This could be done by inculcating a positive approach to describe the kid’s performance and avoiding being critical. Each meeting should have elements that excite the parents and at the same time have points where the kid needs to work upon.
Conclusion
These points are nothing that we are not already aware of and most of them are already being implemented in your preschool in some way or another. However, in order to make sure that your method is validated by the parents to your children, you must do it rigorously and on a regular basis. That is the only and best way to increase admission in school without marketing.