Daniel Walker, Principal of Canterbury College in Queensland, Australia, spoke with SMJ about navigating diverse parent expectations and refining the College’s key messaging to clarify their value proposition and enable staff to ‘speak with one voice’.
SMJ: What has been your personal journey to Headship?
DW: When I first meet people and they ask me, “What do you do?” I still say that I’m a teacher because I initially only intended to be one. In fact, I thought the best job I’d have would be as the Head of History in a nice big school – I was for quite some years and I was very happy – but I felt a calling to make a bigger contribution, and so I went on to be a Deputy Principal at two public schools. Then, in the independent sector, I became the Deputy Principal at Seymour College in Adelaide. From there, in 2019, I had the great fortune of becoming the fifth Principal of Canterbury College.
SMJ: Can you describe Canterbury College?
DW: Canterbury College is an Anglican, Early Learning to Year 12 school of around 1,450 students. We primarily serve Logan, nestled between Brisbane and the Gold Coast, but also the southern suburbs of Brisbane and the northern suburbs of the Gold Coast; it’s a very large (and multicultural) geographic corridor, which adds life and colour to our College community, which we love.
We’re one of the few Anglican schools within the southern suburbs of Brisbane. Within the College, we have inferred over time that our parents see the Anglican faith as a marker of a high-quality academic and values-based education, which means something in our market. We work hard to celebrate that we are an Anglican school, part of a great network of schools throughout the country and here in southern Queensland. It’s a great diocese to be part of.
SMJ: Have there been any challenges in leading Canterbury from a marketing and communications lens?
DW: I think the most complex part of my job is reconciling the different motivations and interests of prospective families. The reality for Canterbury is that we’re a fairly young school, with a really good reputation. Being able to make the case to a very heterogeneous group of parents and staff as to what our mission is and what we’re here (and not here) for, and to be able to pull that off on any given day, is the biggest challenge. That manifests itself in lots of different ways. For example, in our enrolments processes and our specialist programs that we profile. It’s exciting that we’re growing in size and people are very passionate about being Canterbury students and families but being able to articulate the why and joining the common threads of all the different aspirations that parents have for their children – whether academic, sporting, musical or other – is certainly challenging.
SMJ: Over the years, what has changed in response to that challenge?
DW: We could make a list of things that we are: we’re an academic school, we’re a great music school and we have a lot of great sporting achievements because we attract a lot of high talent individuals through our various specialist programs, but the challenge for me is actually being able to talk about the things that Canterbury isn’t. We can’t be everything to everyone all the time, and that’s the maturity that we’ve gone through as a school over the last five to six years.
SMJ: What level of alignment exists between you and the Communications Department?
DW: I don’t know that every Principal has their Director of Communications reporting directly to them – I think they should. I do, personally, because working in concert with the Director of Communications helps me keep my strategic direction priorities in order and ensures that we’re making it clear what type of transformation is happening on campus. For example, across the College, we’re currently embarking on big transformation of our buildings and grounds, our workforce and leadership structures, our learning model, and using AI to track student achievement – all big planks that need a home in what we choose to say about ourselves to parents beyond parent teacher nights and special events. Being connected with the communications team every day, just like I’m connected with the enrolments team every day, keeps that triangulation in place.
SMJ: How did you build a commonality and consistency in the process of refining your messaging?
DW: In the last six months, we’ve gone through a ‘search into the soul’ of the College to make sure what staff, the Executive Team and the College Board thought about Canterbury was what our families also thought about us. Most of our hypotheses around who we were and what we were projecting were right, but there were some surprises. Through the process with imageseven, we realised some of our assumptions about how powerfully or coherently we had spoken about ourselves were not shared by everyone. We worked out that we need to talk about what our ‘World Ready’ ethos means aside from using it in slogans and general terms.
In all of these contexts, you’re only as strong as your weakest link; we can have 7 out of 10 senior leaders, 4 out of 6 heads of faculty and 10 out of 15 co-curricular leaders with a really clear articulation of who we are, but if the remaining people don’t, then the cut through is almost zero. So, it’s actually been about slowing down and controlling the messaging more clearly to articulate the most important parts of a Canterbury education. Of course – as is true with many things in life – less is more. Change management comes down to the alignment of our senior school leaders with our middle school leaders, with people who are out there on the ground – teachers, coaches, corporate services staff – all being aligned in how they speak about the College.
SMJ: How are you articulating the new messaging to the greater community?
DW: We’re planning a new promotional video at the moment which we anticipate will carry quite a lot of that language through voice over, along with my end of term reflection and start of term video. Even in the last six to eight weeks, we’ve been a lot more deliberate in explaining and using our ‘World Ready’ and ‘Four Dimensions’ messaging more clearly in our communications, which has been a win for us.
The source of most of my frustration and confusion prior was when I was publicly advocating for the College or differentiating us from other schools, that I was always feeling that I had left something unsaid. Now I’ve got three verses and the chorus at my fingertips all the time – I am now able to say we’ve captured the whole life of Canterbury in one place and I haven’t left anything out when speaking to people.
SMJ: Has the feedback from stakeholders been positive?
DW: Overall, yes.A wonderful thing happened recently; our College Registrar, who does the majority of our tours, received a copy of the two-pager [Key Messaging Guide] and said, “Not only am I keeping this with me as I walk around on the tours, but it’s giving me a whole new way of talking about aspects of the College that I sometimes forget to mention.”
Other feedback on our messaging mainly comes from the Executive Team and newly hired staff within our Communications Department. What they’ve got, through the two-pager, is the essence of Canterbury laid out for them. It’s been very powerful. We have a couple of new Board Directors and I believe this will give them a deeper understanding about who Canterbury is through five or six talking points. From a governance point of view, it will add a lot of value for me as well.
SMJ: Looking ahead to the future of Canterbury College, what do you anticipate will be the focus of communications?
DW: My great worry for the future is being able to create an affordable enough product for those families who want to stretch towards an independent school education for their kids. At Canterbury, we’ve got a tricky proposition, like a lot of outer suburban schools across the country have, in that our fees will continue to increase above the Customer Price Index over time. We therefore, on a practical level, need to be very confident in our product and in the way that we talk about it rather than simply saying, “We’re a school with lots of opportunities, sport and music offerings and great teachers.”
The Australian independent school sector is going through an interesting existential moment. Fee increases have caught people a little bit by surprise. Independent schools will become more expensive, which is a shame as there are some great families who would have otherwise been in our schools, who might not be able to afford to go the distance. In saying that, our value proposition is much clearer for prospective parents now. By building loyalty, our retention rates over time will increase, even though it’s very likely that our fees will continue to increase above inflation, and that’s an important strategic imperative for us.