Thinking CreativeCentralising Communications: A Proven Shared-Service Model for Trusts
The Challenge
Schools and trusts now compete in a crowded marketplace for pupil enrolment, high-quality staff and community confidence. Yet across the sector, marketing, communications and recruitment are still managed school-by-school, even within a trust.
This decentralised approach creates duplication, inconsistent quality, and missed economies of scale. Office teams spend significant time producing flyers, drafting parent communications and running campaigns, effort that should be focused on school operations and pupil support.
The result is higher cost with lower impact, variable materials, fragmented messaging, and a weakened ability to build a coherent trust reputation. Without a coordinated approach, the trust risks underperforming in enrolment and talent attraction and falling behind competitors with stronger, more unified brand presence.
The Innovation
Thinking Solutions for Education delivers a centralised marketing and communications shared-service model; Thinking Creative, designed specifically for multi-academy trusts. Designed to operate as an in-house agency, Thinking Creative provides specialist, consistent support across Thinking Schools Academy Trust (TSAT)’s 26 schools, shifting the model from fragmented, school-by-school activity to a coordinated, strategic service. This approach enables the Trust to standardise quality, reduce duplication, strengthen reputation, and scale best practice across the organisation, while creating an offer that can be extended externally through MAT-to-MAT services.
How the Model Works
Standardised, Trust-Wide Asset System:
Thinking Creative provides a suite of professionally designed, modular templates for core marketing and communications materials, including prospectuses, banners, leaflets, digital assets, and recruitment materials. Centrally produced and quality-controlled, these assets are locally adaptable, protecting trust brand consistency while enabling each school to express its individual identity.
Campaign-in-a-Box Resources:
For recurring, high-impact activity such as admissions, staff recruitment and major projects, the Thinking Creative team created a ready-to-deploy library of pre-written copy, social content and digital ad creative. This enables schools to launch polished campaigns quickly, reducing lead time and removing the burden of creating materials from scratch.
Proactive Performance Support:
Using performance indicators, the central team identifies schools at risk of missing PAN targets or struggling to fill critical roles. Rather than waiting for requests, Thinking Solutions for Education intervenes early with expert support, designing and executing bespoke campaigns positioning Thinking Creative as a strategic partner focused on outcomes, not just outputs.
A Trust-Level ‘Single Front Door’ for Communications:
Thinking Solutions for Education’s Thinking Creative acts as a central hub for trust-wide communications, coordinating responses from crisis response and sensitive issues to celebratory storytelling and reputation-building. This ensures messages are timely, accurate, and consistent, providing a protective layer that reduces risk, strengthens stakeholder confidence, and amplifies positive impact across the network.
Impact and Outcomes: TSAT Case Example
When implemented within Thinking Schools Academy Trust, this centralised model delivered significant gains both operational efficiency and organisational effectiveness:
By coordinating trust-level communications end-to-end – from crisis response to celebratory storytelling – the central Thinking Creative team removed the day-to-day burden from schools. This freed up hundreds of hours for school leaders and administrative teams to refocus on educational delivery and operational management, while strengthening trust-wide consistency and reducing reputational risk.
Professional, targeted admissions campaigns delivered tangible increases in pupil numbers. A successful rebrand and marketing campaign for the newly formed “Penbridge Schools” exceeded admission targets, while a strategic campaign at The Victory Academy directly supported the case for capital investment to expand its sixth form provision.
Centralised, digital-first recruitment campaigns strengthened the trust’s ability to attract high-quality talent and consistently showcase their brand. Increased online visibility and digital engagement resulted in one in every 26 candidates choosing to apply directly through the trust’s website or social channels, reflecting growing reach, credibility, and employer brand strength.
By centralising marketing, communications, and campaign management, the trust unlocked far greater value for money and achieved a level of marketing quality and consistency that individual schools could never achieve alone. The unified approach not only reduces costs but also elevates the professionalism, consistency and reach of every campaign across the trust.
Why the Model Works
This case study demonstrates how trusts can unlock significant productivity gains by strategically applying a shared-services approach to non-core functions. Thinking Creative (part of Thinking Solutions for Education) is led by Lauren Wilson, Head of Brand Strategy and Partnerships. Drawing on her expertise as an education communications specialist, the innovation lies in recognising that marketing, communications, and recruitment are specialist disciplines that benefit from central expertise, scale, and consistency.
The model resolves the tension between central standardisation and local autonomy. High-quality templates and campaign assets are produced centrally but adapted locally, ensuring brand consistency without erasing individual school identity. This avoids a one-size-fits-all approach and instead creates a partnership: the centre provides expert tools and strategic guidance, while schools bring essential local knowledge and context.
By removing non-core, time-intensive tasks from the frontline, the model strengthens educational leadership and improves trust-wide performance. At the same time, effective communications and marketing secure the pupil numbers, talent and reputation needed to sustain growth and improvement.
A Proven Model, Delivered by Thinking Solutions for Education (TSfE)
Thinking Solutions for Education now delivers this proven centralised communications model to multi-academy trusts looking to improve efficiency, strengthen recruitment and build a coherent, credible brand. Developed within a live trust environment and led by experienced education communications specialists, the model enables trusts to realise the benefits of scale while preserving local identity.
By building a strong, expert centre, Thinking Solutions for Education helps trusts take non-core burdens off school leaders, freeing them to focus on what matters most: improving outcomes for pupils.
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