Thomas’s School in Clapham is a highly respected and successful school, which educates 580 boys and girls between the ages of 4 and 13. It is is one of four London day schools belonging to the same, family-owned group, led by Ben and Tobyn Thomas.

In September 2012, Phil Ward took over as Headmaster, after XXX very successful years at Feltonfleet in Hampshire. He was keen to move Thomas’s Clapham forward, and had clear ideas how to do so, but wanted to make sure he took the staff and parents with him and that he focused on the right areas.

Thomas’s London Day Schools had used SchoolPulse in all 4 of their schools in 2010.

When Phil Ward arrived at Thomas’s Clapham as the new Head, he asked his Leadership Team three questions:

Case StudyStriking the Perfect Balance?Thomas’s School, Clapham

The context

Using SchoolPulse to answer key questions

Have we got the balance right?

What do we needto improve?

How arewe doing?

“I had a great team with some strong ideas but I was already thinking about constructing our first Development Plan and really needed to discover some actionable insights quickly, such as;

Thomas’s had run a SchoolPulse Parent Survey just before I joined and I soon discovered that it provided rich and actionable results which would enable us to plan for the future with confidence.”

Thomas’s Clapham’s previous 2010 SchoolPulse Parent Survey had confirmed the health and popularity of the School as well as indicating areas where further progress might be made. One such area was ‘Providing advice on the next phase of your child’s education’ – in numerical terms, this was scoring lower than the Thomas brothers wanted. And the qualitative information and comments explained why. The new Head and his Leadership Team were able to use this information – and the reasons behind the data - when reviewing their provision, in order to make it both more comprehensive and tailored to individual family needs. It became a focus.

When Phil commissioned a follow-up SchoolPulse Parent Survey in 2013 he was delighted to discover that their hard work had paid off and “Providing advice on the next phase of education” had improved by 29 percentage points, which not only exceeded the SchoolPulse benchmark of similar Prep schools, but placed Thomas’s in the top 5 of all schools surveyed. In fact, Thomas’s Clapham had leapt forward on most measures including the 3 SchoolPulse key performance indicators of overall satisfaction, advocacy and exceeding parent expectations.

Who are our closest competitors and what

is our competitive advantage?

How do we compare with other prep

schools in the UK?

What do our parents value most about our

School?

What should our improvement priorities be?

The research findings in 2010

How things had changed in 2013

SchoolPulse Case Study

By using SchoolPulse to pinpoint the school’s greatest areas of competitive advantage, Phil and his team could refine the school’s marketing strategy accordingly.

As well as finding out how well his school performed against similar prep schools on almost 40 school features, Phil and his Leadership Team were able to discover exactly what the parents valued most about Thomas’s educational offering and what their improvement priorities were.

Phil added, “Gratifyingly, much of what we discovered provided objective confirmation of our own instincts. The robust statistical data provided us with unarguable facts and the wealth of verbatim parent comments and suggestions made the results presentation a rich and memorable exercise and one which was immediately acted upon.”

Other important findings

Please do not change your enthusiastic attitude to children.

You have achieved a great balance as the Head with trying

to keep learning fun and you have made the school much

more welcoming. Please keep this up and continue your

emphasis on leadership and thinking of others.

The teaching staff is amazingly capable, supportive,

understanding and fun. We can’t fault them at all and are very happy to have our children in

such outstanding hands.

Excellent teachers, passionate about their subjects. A real drive

and energy is tangible.”

It was a very positive start to school life for both my son

and us as parents. We felt well informed and it all went very

smoothly.

Our two children are very different and we have found

the school very able to cope successfully with such

differences and encourage them both to love school. Well done.

We would like to see Spanish offered as a language choice from Year 7 to enable those children who enter schools at 13+ to continue with

the language.

To find out more about how RSA SchoolPulse, can benefit your school, please contact Louise Peddie on 01572 821306 or info@rsacademics.co.uk

Striking the right balance between academic achievement and the focus on other activities is a challenge for every school. For Prep Schools in London, where there is great pressure to obtain entry into competitive senior schools, it can be hard to strike the balance that people want.

So Phil was delighted when SchoolPulse confirmed that his School had not only exceeded the comparative schools’ benchmark, but had increased the number of parents declaring that the balance at Thomas’s’ was just right - improving by 3 percentage points to over 80% - demonstrating that Thomas’s is successfully meeting the aims of the vast majority of its parents in effectively fulfilling their children’s potential, both in and outside the classroom.

“Everything in life needs balance, and nothing more so than a child’s education. So knowing that we are getting that right is incredibly important to both me and my team.”

Examples of SchoolPulse Survey parent feedback

SchoolPulse Case Study