“The problem with words is that you don’t know whose mouth they’ve been in.”
Dennis Potter said that. And he was right. The writer behind The Singing Detective spent a career wrestling with how language, when wielded deliberately, could control, inspire or destroy.
The world is saturated with words but short on meaning.
In schools, words are our currency. But how often do we really consider what they’re buying?
Take the humble weekly update from a Principal. It’s too often written at a point in the week when time and energy have already run dry. It’s a well-meaning list of wins, reminders, and the occasional “a great time was had by all.” Sound familiar?
Or consider the teacher, typing away at student reports across a stolen weekend, willing their thesaurus to yield just one more synonym for “conscientious.” If your name starts with Z, your feedback might be accurate, but it may arrive with a whiff of linguistic exhaustion.
These aren’t trivial things. These words are the frontline of school culture.
They build or break community. They tell your story. They shape your brand, your trust, your connection.
So what would it look like if schools treated communication not as an afterthought, but as a strategic asset? What if communication were seen as something on a par with curriculum design or technology?
What if instead of draining energy, school communication became lighter to write and stronger in impact?
That’s not about handing your voice over to ChatGPT, fishing random sentences from the great Internet soup. (That’s peak “you don’t know whose mouth it’s been in.”)
It is about doing the deep work:
Defining your school’s tone of voice.
Distilling your “story zero”, the narrative from which all others flow.
Mapping the stories you’d rather ignore, and choosing instead to lead with them.
Laying out the seasons of your communication for the year ahead.
Creating a shared language that aligns your values, admissions, onboarding and community voice.
Understanding just how to create your own distinctive GPTs that stop you entering the random writing world of everyone else.
This is brand strategy done right.
And it doesn’t have to cost $30k.