We’re probably all gearing up for the early registration push for next year, my goodness it always rolls round so quickly, doesn’t it? Many language schools open registration early so that existing customers can guarantee their places for the coming year. This is also when we probably measure student retention, how many of our students stay with us and how many don’t?
We spend lots of time and money on getting new students, so much energy on marketing and sales. Do we do enough to keep the students we already have? Why do students leave? What can we do about it? We measure student numbers, average class size, room occupancy, etc, we should measure student retention too.
We can also view this positively and turn the questions round. How many of our students stay? Why do they stay? We have lots of happy students too, its important to keep balance.
In these days of contracting language school markets we should be really focussed on these questions, our schools and our jobs depend on it.
Managing in TEFL is a fortnightly companion for language school leaders written by Simon Pearlman and brought to you by Active Language Teacher Training.
How are we doing?
It may well be that your retention figures are good, that it’s not a problem for you, that’s probably the first thing to consider. We need to know our numbers and then it’s useful to compare with other schools in similar situations to you. Benchmarking with other schools can be a useful thing to do, of course, not with immediate competition.
When students leave or don’t come back the following year, we should try to find out why. We should keep good records and then see if we can spot trends. When we ask people, their responses might not be totally reliable and we should factor that in too. We need to dig a little deeper and try to get into the truth.
Why do students leave? How can we respond?
We also need to accept that students will leave, let’s not take it personally. There are many reasons that we can't do anything about. What are “acceptable” reasons? And which ones help us to look critically at what we're doign? We could maybe uncover some areas for growth if we follow it up. Perhaps the students are leaving the area, could we offer them online classes? Maybe the student has reached their objective of B2, why aren’t they motivated to go for the C1? Is there anything more we could have done? Are there changes we can make? Or it could be that the family has fallen on harder times, could we offer a scholarship?
Some things are more clearly at our door, and hopefully things we can do something about. “I'm not progressing”, “I don’t like the teacher/class”, “I’m bored” are some of the comments we might hear. This is when our ears should prick up, these are dissatisfied customers, what can we learn from them?
And what about pricing? Is our pricing encouraging our customers to drift to our competitors? How do our prices compare with your local competitors? We can consider special offers, recommendation incentives, or perhaps collaborations.
Helping students and teachers more can help student retention
If we work more closely with teachers, we can be aware of their strengths and weaknesses. Teaching is a human endeavour, we all have things to work on. How can we help them to help their classes become more harmonious, more effective and better places to be? How can we help them to help their students more? Of course, professional development is key here. What sort of professional development programme do you have?
The same is true of students: the more closely we work with students, the more they will feel valued and looked after and they are more likely to stay. Let’s ask ourselves how we can help the students more. How can we help them to enjoy the classes more, to learn more, to be happier? Part of the answer is in inclusivity, working with each and every student to find out how we can best help them.
Make it special, think about extras
Steve Jobs suggested we always start with the customer experience, always try to make it magical. How can we make coming to English class magical? The experience can start as soon as they arrive, a smile, a welcome, use their names, connect with parents. Using English as much as possible, from the moment they arrive can create a spark.
We can add special extras to help students feel valued. Where can add value for our customers? We could have tutorials for students who might need extra help or maybe exam practice for those coming up for the big day. Maybe we could build a library for our students, we could celebrate special days. We can increase interaction with parents through parents meetings or special open doors days where families can come in and join in with things.
Keep reselling the school to them
We should never take our students for granted and we need to keep reminding them why they chose us in the first place. We might want to go for the old marketing adage of “Show, don’t tell”, let’s show how good we are; good Exam results, picturess of happy people, etc. This is where our social media might be helpful. What’s our social media strategy? And do we have a database mailshop strategy?
The student retention metric is one of the KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, keeping students is a sign that things are going well. Let’s focus on those numbers especially at this time of year.
Oh, now there's a question. What are your KPIs? Do let us know in the comments whereever you read this.
Managing in TEFL is a fortnightly companion for language school leaders written by Simon Pearlman and brought to you by Active Language Teacher Training providers of Trinity CertTESOL, DipTESOL and Teaching Younger Learners courses. See www.activelanguage.net for more information.