Whose voice is really speaking at the start of your school year?

There’s a moment just before the new school year kicks off, when the calendar clears, the energy builds, and the Head of School sits down to write that speech.

You know the one. It’s got to rally the staff, welcome the students, reassure the parents. All in 20 minutes.

Or it could be the head of department, thinking about how to welcome back the team. Or the ops team, galvinising themselves after a summer of work. Or, in the southern hemisphere, a team leader wanting to inspire the team over the mid-year hump and into the end-of-year sprint.

These talks should land with confidence and clarity. But too often, it lands with a well-meaning splat of metaphors. Education as a journey. Staff as gardeners. Learning as a fire to be lit.

Richard Shotton is a behavioural science heavyweight and one of our constant references in our brand strategy work. He recently reminded us just how powerful those metaphors are.

For example, in a research study, people read the same paragraph about rising crime. The only difference? One version called crime a beast, the other a virus. That one word completely changed how people thought the problem should be tackled, and their degree of apathy or agency.

Shotton and teams like ours at NoTosh get paid to get this stuff right. We’ve spent years doing the reading and homework to make sure we don’t fall into the trap of tropes.

But most school leaders don’t get to spend 20 hours on a 20-minute talk. So they do the sensible thing: they use what worked last time, what’s worked for others, or they ask AI for help (which is doing the exact same thing as the previous two).

The problem is that AI doesn’t choose powerful metaphors. It picks popular ones.

And so we get speeches that sound about right, but don’t say anything new.

Speeches that use metaphors to decorate ideas, not deepen them.

Speeches that could have been written for any school, anywhere.

If you’re using someone else’s metaphors, you’re probably using someone else’s strategy, someone else’s thinking.

If you want to get this right, this week, but don’t have twenty hours to spare, then spend twenty minutes working out your own voice - what does it sound like?

Do you know your school’s voice well enough to reject the generic? And if you’re the Head of School, do you know your own voice as clearly?

Write down what it is. Write down what it is not. Spend twenty minutes doing that.

Then write your speech.