I was appointed Project Communications Officer by the team behind the free school bid for West Didsbury in June 2014. Immediately I worked on the website, scoring the many tenders for design, liaising with the winning bid and populating the site with content to go live just over two months later. We were after a professional, slick and welcoming website rather than one which looked like a primary school website – we needed to stand out.
At the same time, I wrote a prospectus for September 2015 entry, which you can look at here.
The challenge was to encourage prospective parents to sign their children up to West Didsbury CE Primary School when it doesn’t exist yet and will be a building site for the first year. This is quite a leap of faith for parents when making such a big decision for their children, so it’s been fantastic to see the support the school has received in the press and local community.
I also helped to co-ordinate a public consultation process, the results of which were outstandingly in our favour.