While many in education would have been part of informal rebrands in their career - be it of a particular school policy or some tweaks to how a school presented itself to its community - the formal rebrand processes common in other industries have been largely absent from education.

However, as multi-academy trusts grow and consolidation ramps up, MATs are suddenly finding themselves brushing up on their rebranding knowledge and rolling out large-scale transformation processes.

This matters because having a strong brand that accurately reflects what your trust is about can have a significant bearing on your future prospects.

“This is a rapidly moving market where consolidation is happening,” Robert Jones, professor of brand leadership at the University of East Anglia, tells Tes. “In that kind of market, it is important to be clear and confident about who you are, what you stand for and where you’re going.”

This is key not just to ensure parents, pupils and your own staff know what you are about (and perhaps helps entice new staff to your trust) but it can also help other trusts and schools who may want to join to understand who you are, too.

This is not easy though - because it is such an emerging area, little best practice exists to help. “There’s almost no research in the area of brand in the public sector,” says Cathie Paine, CEO of the primary-only MAT REAch2.

This lack of research led her to study for an MBA on brand and the public sector to learn more about how to bolster her trust’s brand among children, parents and staff.

From this, she said, it was clear that the importance of a brand to help create a sense of “belonging” is vital: “Nothing’s going to replace [children’s] sense of belonging to their own school in their community, [but] what I learned is they’re actually extremely keen to be part of something bigger.”

Many trusts will hope to have this brand already but, either through a realisation they have outgrown their original branding or through consolidation, their branding is now inaccurate or irrelevant and needs changing.

So what’s involved in a rebrand and how can you ensure you do it well? Here’s how different trusts have approached the conceptual part of the process - and then how they tackled the logistical challenges, too.

1. Changing Lives Learning Trust: a crowd-sourced approach

The Changing Lives Learning Trust was formerly the West Lakes Academy Trust, a name originating from a single school, West Lakes Academy.

As the trust expanded across Cumbria to oversee five schools, the name no longer made sense, according to CEO Jonathan Johnson. “West Lakes was never going to fulfil that brief, so we needed to rebrand,” he says.

While the trust could have gone out to a brand agency for help, Johnson says he wanted a new name to come from within the trust and the community within which it was situated.

“It’s just a no-brainer that you’re going to consult with the very people you serve,” he says.

As such, the trust used Google Forms to invite pupils, parents and staff to suggest new names. The board then narrowed the “hundreds and hundreds” of responses to five options.

From this, they chose Changing Lives Learning Trust, taken from the trust’s existing strapline, “Changing lives through learning”.

The trust then invited every pupil across its schools to design a new logo. Three winning entries, all from primary children, were chosen, with a plan to combine these into a final logo.

Keen to keep things in-house - and save money - the trust went to its community to ask if anyone had the graphic design skills to help. As no one was forthcoming, an external designer was used.

2. Penrose Learning Trust: using rebranding specialists

“Originally we were three schools in South Suffolk,” says Sarah Skinner, CEO of what was then the aptly named South Suffolk Learning Trust - but is now Penrose Learning Trust.

When the trust was asked to sponsor a school in North Essex - and with firm plans for further growth that have now led it to oversee nine schools in the two counties - a new brand was deemed necessary.

To do this, it brought in a branding company from day one.

“We wanted to do it properly, and really think about what the name meant, our values, and how all that worked together,” Skinner explains.

The local company the trust employed spent time with the MAT, discussing its purpose, ideology, approach and ambitions. It came up with a “bank of words” that informed suggestions for a new name. These were then taken to staff, pupils and parents to gather feedback via opinion polls.

The name they chose was Penrose Learning Trust, after Roger Penrose, the renowned mathematician and academic who was born in Colchester in Essex.

The trust worked on the rebrand over the course of an academic year and “drip-fed” the launch to parents and carers via newsletters, Skinner says.

The change was announced in each school during internal assemblies, with new signage going up for September.

3. Central Region Schools Trust: the complex rebrand

Some trusts have had rebranding changes forced upon them - this was the case for the Central RSA Academies Trust, which was founded in 2012 with sponsorship from the Royal Society of Arts (RSA).

In 2020, the RSA decided to end its partnership with all schools, meaning the trust needed to change its name.

While CEO Guy Shears says the trust could have used this opportunity to “radically change” the trust’s name and wider brand, they wanted to stick close to what they had before because the name was well known in the community.

As such they settled on Central Region Schools Trust and added the strapline “Founded by the RSA”, which they began using from September 2021.

Interestingly, because of the nature of this rebrand, Shears and his team couldn’t go to their wider community for ideas as things had to be kept confidential.

“We knew we’d have to change the name of the trust once the legal process [of the change of sponsorship] was completed, but we couldn’t discuss it with them until it was, so we weren’t able to reach out to wider stakeholders as soon as we would have done otherwise.”

As such he says it was key that when the changes were announced they had already put together a strategy to communicate the changes “so that people understood the rationale and felt reassured that we weren’t changing into something different”.

• Has your trust got its strategy right?
• Why schools’ websites should be a major trust concern
• MAT Tracker: mapping the country’s multi-academy trusts

4. Kings Academy Trust: changing the logo

Not every rebrand involves a name change - sometimes it’s just about changing a colour palette, strapline or logo - which is exactly what the Kings Academy Trust, an eight-school MAT in Greater Manchester, did in 2023.

CEO Amanda Nicholson tells Tes that the trust’s logo was previously a crown image, which she felt was too generic and “just didn’t mean anything to us”.

After a period of growth, she wanted something that felt more appropriate for all the trust’s schools and that “links to our vision, our values and our mission statements”.

To do this, the trust worked with a creative marketing agency that helped them decide upon a tree logo, which represents how the trust offers its pupils a “strong foundation” with the opportunity to “branch out”, she describes.

Now each of the trust’s schools uses a tree, but with the option to use different varieties of tree and their choice of colours - “because every school is different”, Nicholson says.

Rebranding a trust: money and logistics

So new name chosen, logo agreed, colour palettes signed off - job done?

Well, not quite. Once you’ve done all this, the practical and administrative work begins - something that can be unexpectedly complicated, as Johnson at Changing Lives Learning Trust notes.

“Strangely, despite all the planning, the most difficult part was all the legislative stuff that we had to do post-change,” he says, referencing work such as updating Companies House and bank accounts.

He also says that as the schools’ outside signage showed the old logo, this needed changing - although rather than replacing the signs entirely, a more cost-effective measure was used.

“We added little transfer stickers at the bottom of billboards that now say Changing Lives Learning Trust instead of West Lakes Academy Trust.”

At Kings Academy, the change of the logo also led to old signs, headed letter paper, leaflets and even entrance rugs having to be replaced: “It was a massive job and lots of stuff just had to be recycled,” says Nicholson.

She says most of this was costed in as part of the process, although she admits the trust didn’t consider everything, such as signage on minibuses, which had to be factored in later.

But perhaps the biggest issue is uniforms, as this directly affects parents and carers who face the prospect of buying new items - something that may not go down well.

At Central Region Schools Trust, for example, one school had to change its uniform to have a new badge on blazers. However, Shears says the trust negotiated a year’s grace period with the RSA for parents to do this, giving them time to budget.

At another school, ties had to be replaced. But the school paid for this from its own budget to avoid issues with parents.

Rebranding a trust: transparent communication

Uniforms weren’t an issue at Penrose Learning Trust, where they stayed at “school level”, Skinner says, without trust branding.

However, the trust was still questioned about why it was spending money on the other elements of the rebrand, as Skinner explains: “[We] had a couple of parents who wrote in asking why we were spending money on that when school budgets are tight.”

She says, though, that as the trust brings in money from work done by herself and colleagues via external roles, they used this income to pay for the rebrand, so no core funding was used. “I explained I brought in additional income, which paid for it,” she says.

Keeping an eye on costs was something that Johnson at Changing Lives Learning Trust says was key when talking to its community about the rebrand:

“We’re absolutely aware we operate on public money, so in every communication, we listed how much it was going to cost, so everything was done with complete transparency.” You can read example letters of how this was communicated on the trust’s website.

Meanwhile, at Kings Academy Trust, Nicholson describes the rebrand as “costly”, but says the money came from its reserves so did not take away from day-to-day funding.

For brand expert Professor Jones, it is no surprise that cost is such an important consideration for education leaders, especially in these financially tough times: “[There is a risk] that people will see it as a waste of money when money is very tight.”

However, he says leaders “have to think about branding as a long-term investment” that is linked to the ongoing and future success of an organisation.

“In a lot of situations, the risk of not doing it could be greater.”

Ellen Peirson-Hagger is senior writer at Tes

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