Case Study: Parental engagement in schools

About the client

VenturEd Solutions provides software to the UK schools sector, with a focus on school communications, payments and data solutions. Having completed an earlier phase of market research, the team wanted to explore a specific and strategically important topic: parental engagement.

The brief

VenturEd needed to understand what parental engagement means to schools, the challenges they face, and where the gaps lie in the tools and technology currently available. They also wanted to test their own messaging alongside competitor communications to understand how schools respond to different product positioning.

Our approach

We used a mixed-methods design, starting with 20 in-depth qualitative interviews with school leaders and school business managers across both Primary and Secondary settings. Participants were recruited via our teacher panel and through targeted outreach, and the research was conducted "blind" so that participants were not aware of who had commissioned it. We followed this with an online survey to test the qualitative findings at scale. The research also included a message-testing exercise, where we presented participants with marketing communications from VenturEd and several competitors and captured their reactions.

The outcome

The research revealed that while almost all schools consider parental engagement a priority, approaches and challenges vary significantly between Primary and Secondary settings. It highlighted a major unmet need and identified the features that schools are most drawn to. The message testing provided direct, actionable feedback on VenturEd's positioning. The findings gave VenturEd a clear roadmap for product innovation, separate messaging strategies for Primary and Secondary markets, and concrete recommendations for improving how they communicate with schools.