On the education mission, and the case for selling it.
The operations director told me I was rude. She wasn’t entirely wrong. This essay is what I should have said. And Hoopoe & Co. is what I’m doing about it.
There is a short course provider I know well. Their programme is genuinely distinctive and by now well known. The price is right for the demographic they target, and that demographic is wide. Families find them, contact them, and book within days. The admissions team responds to enquiries — mostly by email, fairly promptly — and then waits. They don’t follow up. They don’t lead conversations. The implicit question for the families contacting them isn’t shall we book you or shall we book someone else. It’s shall we book you or shall we not book at all. They looked slightly confused, and then slightly embarrassed on my behalf, when I asked about “sales”.
They have been fully booked each summer since 2023.
If this sounds like you, this essay isn’t for you, yet. But it probably isn’t you.
The summer school market was like that for many. The idea that you might actively pursue a lead would have seemed unnecessary, perhaps even a little tasteless. Summer schools didn’t sell, they admitted.
For most providers, that world is gone. But the instinct it formed — the slightly diffident response to enquiry, the follow-up that doesn’t quite follow through, the quiet faith that a strong enough product will sell itself — has stayed.
A head of admissions I used to know — call her Katie — was idealistic, egalitarian, committed to her team’s wellbeing. Everyone helped everyone, and did everything: answered enquiries, managed agent relationships, handled payments, sent confirmations, chased documents, updated records. When it was quiet or only moderately busy, this was manageable. The model functioned well enough that nobody questioned it.
But I noticed that even in the quieter periods, there was no particular urgency to get back to enquiries. The team was busy, but lacked a commercial orientation. A waiting enquiry was just another item on the list. I suggested a commission structure to invigorate the sales function. Katie pulled a face. Her team, she told me, should and would do the work because it was their job.
As it got busier, the team absorbed the increasing volume by working ever harder. Enquiries came in. The team responded. Enquiries converted. Conversions meant more bookings to process. More bookings meant more admin. More admin sat on the same desks as the enquiries, which kept coming in along with more bookings. Response times crept up. The admin fell further behind. Parents began to send their polite reminders.
The team were drowning themselves.
Ultimately, operational pressure inside an admissions function pulls towards the immediately urgent. As payments need chasing, letters need issuing, and welfare concerns escalate, the enquiry that went quiet three days ago raises no alarm. The scandal — which is lost opportunity — is almost silent.
By May, the team had to be called off enquiries entirely. The pre-summer peak booking period became instead an all-hands-on-admin effort. Then came an extra hour daily, and then the six-day week. Temps were brought in to recover sales, with one day of training. Sales stalled. Admin was somehow still a slog.
That very summer, I found myself in conversation with the summer school operations director. She was lamenting the student numbers, which seemed to me an opening.
Part of the issue, I said, is that we need to sell ourselves, and no longer just trust that being great at what we do is enough. We should recognise that admissions, for example, requires two fundamentally different orientations — hunters, and gardeners. We’re asking the wrong people to hunt through gritted teeth, and it limits our ability to take advantage of the opportunities we create.
She stopped me. What I had said, she told me, was rude.
The gardeners framing struck her as derogatory — she thought I was chest-beating on behalf of sales, and that I looked down on our colleagues who weren’t built for it. But her objection, which she made plainly, went deeper than that. Yes, families pay, but what we offer is good, and if they want it, we tell them about it and they decide. That’s not sales. Sales implies techniques, pressure, nudges however gentle. And that, she felt, was incompatible with what we were doing. We don’t sell, we serve, and the distinction matters. Besides — good programmes fill themselves. They ought to, anyway. And if the organisation was heading somewhere she didn’t recognise, she told me, she might decide it wasn’t for her.
What I didn’t say — and perhaps should have — is that she was lamenting numbers in one breath and dismissing the methods that might restore them in the next.
She left not long after. She gracefully acknowledged my commitment to education, in a way she didn’t have to. But one of her team members, leaving at the same time, was more direct. She told me she could no longer work in a company that was only about the money.
That conversation stayed with me. The operations director was lamenting the numbers, but I arrived with my diagnosis intact without spending more time in discovery. She couldn’t hear what I was actually saying, because I hadn’t created the conditions for her to hear it.
If I’d listened to her first I would have said something simpler: that if you believe in what you’ve built, then the commercial expression of that belief should match the confidence of the programme itself. Why would the conversation with a family considering a booking be the one place that confidence stutters?
I don’t dismiss the values clash she described, and in our industry she isn’t alone in feeling it. But values require their promoters to survive in order to affect the world. If the numbers fail, there are no programmes to believe in, no staff to inspire, no students to transform. The mission and the commercial function are mutually dependent. Selling well isn't a compromise of the educational mission. It is an expression of it.
If you met an interested parent at the school gate, you’d tell them how good your programme is, and you’d mean every word. In sales we are the human face of the company. Why shouldn’t we evangelise a little?
So, let's be upfront that sales is about money. Not exclusively, not cynically, but ultimately. And there is no version of this argument worth making that pretends otherwise.
Katie hadn’t thought about redundancy — about what happens to the commercial function when everything else gets busy. The pipeline doesn’t pause politely. Prospects go cold. Families find someone or something else to commit to. No-one knows what was lost that summer.
A dedicated sales function doesn’t have that problem. So long as there are prospects in the pipeline, the hunter is nurturing them — with care, with attentiveness, with respect for the family’s decision-making process, but without distraction or interruption. The enquiry that came in on a Friday afternoon doesn’t sit in a queue behind a stack of medical forms. The family that went quiet three days ago gets a follow-up, because following up is the job, not a distraction from it.
A well-run sales function doesn’t just convert enquiries — it asks a parent whether they have other children or friends who might benefit, and whether an extended stay is something the family would consider. These questions aren’t exploitative. They represent genuine interest in the family — and they happen to generate revenue that funds the programme.
The parent at the end of that conversation — if it has been handled well — doesn’t feel sold to. They feel heard, and good about themselves. That is the job. The fact that it also keeps the lights on is not a contradiction. It is the point.
None of this means the challenges of the industry are solely admissions’ problem to solve. Operations, programme design, staffing models, pricing strategy — they will face their own reckoning as the market continues to tighten. But admissions is where the quickest wins are, and the wins here touch everything else. It doesn’t require a new product, a new proposition, or a ground-up rethink. It requires honest design work on a function that most organisations haven’t reconsidered for too long. If there is one thing to fix before anything else, fix this.
The operations director told me I was rude. Maybe I was. But I wasn’t wrong about the diagnosis. The following year, I inherited the team I wrote about in the first essay in this series — understaffed, overstretched, structured around the assumption that good people doing everything would be enough. I rebuilt it differently. The output matched, and sometimes exceeded, what the previous larger team had produced.
Earlier this year Wilson called. His two daughters had been with us last summer, and he wanted them to return. He asked for me personally. I let him know how glad we were to hear from him, told him about a programme I thought would suit his girls this year, and then put him through to Lily, who would guide him through re-enrolment. She’ll look after you even better than me, I told him. And she is.
Summer begins with the experience a family has with admissions. Long before a student arrives and the programme has had any chance to do its work — there is a phone call, or an email, that sets the emotional tone for everything that follows. That first conversation is the programme’s opening act. It deserves the same care, the same craft, and the same confidence as everything that comes after it.
Behind every enquiry is a child with a particular need and a parent with particular hopes and worries. Done well, the conversation ends with a student who has been genuinely advised and a family who trusts you before their child has crossed the threshold. One who felt processed, or chased too hard, or not followed up with at all, will carry doubt that no amount of excellent delivery will fully dissolve.
A family has decided their child is going on a summer programme. They will likely spend the money either way. The question is whether they spend it on your programme — the one you built with care and sincerely believe will genuinely serve their child — or on an alternative. If you believe what you offer is better, letting them go isn’t a neutral act of respect. It’s a failure of confidence dressed up as one.