Every year, School Marketing Manifesto brings marketing and admissions teams from across Australia together for their School Marketing Retreat, and it's one of our favourite events to support. A room full of people who spend their days telling their schools' stories, given a full day to actually think about how to tell them better, is exactly the kind of event worth showing up for.

This year, I led a session at the retreat that turned six years of admissions data into a live, slightly uncomfortable experiment, and it's worth sharing more broadly.

The data: schools are getting less clear, not more

Since 2021, the share of schools that say they have a clearly defined unique selling proposition has fallen every single year: 81% in 2021, down to 67%, then 63%, then 49% by 2024. In 2025/26, the survey stopped asking the question altogether.

Here's the part that stings: over that same period, the share of schools investing in social media advertising climbed steadily, more than doubling. Schools are spending more than ever to be seen, while getting less clear, year on year, about what they actually want people to see once they're looking.

It's not evenly distributed either. Smaller schools are feeling it hardest: 73% of schools with 1–500 students reported flat or declining enrolments in 2025, compared to two-thirds of large schools (1,300+) reporting growth. Differentiation isn't a brand nicety anymore; for a lot of schools, it's existential.

The 60 second exercise you can do for your school

Rather than leave that as an abstract stat, the session put it to the test. Tables had 60 seconds to agree on one sentence describing what makes their school different, not a list of five things, just one. For a lot of tables, that alone was the finding: agreeing on a single sentence in under a minute is harder than it sounds, and a table that goes silent or starts arguing is telling you something real about the state of their story internally. Give it a go with your team and see where you land.

The gut check: does the internet agree with you?

Then came the harder test. Attendees opened whatever AI tool they had on hand — being sure to use incognito mode so they wouldn't get a biased response based on their account — and typed one prompt: what is [school name] known for, and what makes it different from other schools nearby? Then they compared the answer against what they'd just written down.

For some schools, it matched. For plenty of others, it didn't, and the gap itself became an incredibly useful data point. Three questions followed naturally: Did AI describe your school in a similar way to how your team did? If not, where is that other story coming from? Old website copy, reviews, word of mouth, social channels, or nowhere at all? And whose job is it to close that gap?

Practical takeaways to act on this week

The session closed with starting points teams could take back to their desks immediately:

• Get specific about who you're writing for. Not "families," but the parent Googling your school at 11pm, and what exactly sent them there.
• Narrow to one sentence. If a family only read one line about your school, what's the one thing you'd want them to walk away knowing?
• Audit where that story currently lives. Homepage, open day speech, enrolment emails, or nowhere at all.
• Pick one fix you can make by Friday. Not a full rebrand: one page, one line, one asset.
• Check what AI and Google are already saying about you, quarterly, not annually. The story being told about your school changes faster than most review cycles account for.

It's worth remembering that word of mouth still drives 71% of how families hear about schools, well ahead of any paid channel, including the ever growing spend on social. More visibility doesn't fix an unclear story; it just puts the unclear story in front of more people.

The session gave teams a real, named problem to work on rather than a theoretical one. That's exactly the value events like this create, and exactly why we keep coming back. Thanks to School Marketing Manifesto for another great retreat, and to every marketing and admissions team who gave up a Monday to do the hard thinking that most days don't leave room for.