If you sell to schools, the frustration is probably familiar.
Calls don’t get through. Emails remain unopened. Events generate conversations, but rarely with the person who can actually approve a purchase.
Most school suppliers diagnose this as a marketing problem.
“We need better messaging! Better targeting! Better follow-up!”
Sometimes that is true. More often, it isn’t.
The real issue is structural. The sector shifted, and a lot of go-to-market thinking didn’t shift with it.
The school market has changed
In England, FFT Education Datalab puts the count at over 10,000 academies, with 89% inside a multi-academy trust.
That is waaay beyond a trend. That is the system.
And as MATs have grown, decisions that used to live inside individual schools have moved upwards into central teams.
Schools Week recently calculated that the 30 largest trusts alone now top-slice around £200 million from school budgets to fund those central functions, and that the per-pupil top-slice has risen 50% since 2021.
For suppliers, that changes who needs convincing, how decisions get made, and what marketing now has to do.
The old school-by-school playbook no longer gets you far enough
For a long time, many suppliers grew in a fairly straightforward way.
They found a receptive school, spoke to a senior leader, demoed the product, and won adoption one school at a time.
That model made sense in a more fragmented system. If enough schools said yes, you could build real momentum.
That route still exists, but it is no longer enough.
In a MAT, the person who sees the value in a product is often not the person who can sign it off.
A headteacher may like it. A curriculum lead may want it. A school business manager may see the practical benefit.
But the final decision may sit with a COO, CFO, central procurement lead, trust-wide school improvement team, or a wider executive group.
The access problem is real
Once decision-making moves to trust level, access gets harder.
Trust leadership teams are small and their time is tightly protected. The people making trust-wide decisions are often responsible for finance, operations, estates, IT, compliance, staffing, and improvement across multiple schools at once.
That means they are not easy to reach, and their inboxes are not lightly defended. MAT Execs diaries are not wide open.
Unfortunately, a lot of vendor outreach assumes otherwise.
This is where a lot of go-to-market plans start to wobble.
in a centralised market, access is the bottleneck. If an education company cannot earn time with the people who decide, no amount of activity downstream will fix that.
Even events can create a false sense of traction. You may come away with good conversations, useful interest and a fuller CRM, but still be no closer to the person who can actually say yes.
Plenty of people can discuss your product. Fewer can take responsibility for adopting it across a trust.
Why traditional school marketing often falls flat with MATs
A lot of school-sector marketing was built for a more open market.
It assumed that if you could get in front of enough school leaders, explain the benefit clearly, and show a few relevant case studies, demand would build.
That logic breaks down when decision-making is centralised.
Trust leaders are not just assessing whether something looks useful. They are assessing whether it can work across multiple schools without creating more complexity, cost, inconsistency, or risk.
This matters even more in the current climate. School and trust leaders are making decisions under real pressure, tight budgets, and high levels of accountability.
They are weighing rollout, consistency, governance, data, commercial terms, and impact across a group of schools. They are also doing it under pressure.
For example, the number of pupils in England with identified SEND has now passed 1.86 million, with the EHCP cohort up 11.6% in a single year, according to the Department for Education’s 2025/26 statistics.
A classroom-level promise to “save teachers time” or “improve outcomes” doesn’t answer the questions a trust leader is actually asking.
It tells them what the product does. It doesn’t tell them whether adopting it across the group will create more value than it costs.
Reputation now does more of the heavy lifting
For many suppliers, the real work starts long before the first sales call.
There’s a decent chance Trust leaders may already have formed a view on whether a company feels credible, relevant, and low-risk before any direct conversation happens.
That view is shaped by things such as:
- whether peers talk about the supplier positively
- whether the company shows a real understanding of school and trust pressures
- whether the proof points feel relevant beyond a single enthusiastic school
- whether the message sounds commercially serious, rather than full of school-marketing clichés
If your positioning sounds like every other supplier promising engagement, efficiency, and improved outcomes, you are easy to ignore.
If your message shows that you understand how trust decisions actually get made, you stand a better chance of being taken seriously.
You are usually selling to two audiences, not one
This is the other mistake suppliers make.
They assume the same message can do both jobs.
At school level, people tend to care about the local, practical question.
Will this save time? Will staff use it? Will it help pupils? Will it solve a real problem in the day-to-day running of the school?
(All pertinent, of course).
At trust level, the questions are broader.
Can this work across multiple schools? How hard is it to implement? Does it create consistency or complexity? Is it financially sensible? Does it support trust-wide priorities? Can we justify this decision if we are challenged on it later?
Both audiences matter. But they are not looking at your product or service in the same way, and they are not judging the same risk.
The suppliers who scale inside MATs run two narratives in parallel:
- A practical, classroom-grounded story for the people who use the product
- A commercial, operational story for the people who decide whether to roll it out.
What this means for suppliers selling to schools
Suppliers that still rely on the old school-by-school playbook will keep running into the same wall.
Interest from schools will not reliably turn into adoption if the trust-level case is weak.
The companies that adapt will be the ones that understand three things:
- The decision makers may sit higher up the system than they used to.
- Access to that decision maker is limited, so credibility has to do more work earlier.
- Winning school-level interest is no longer the same as winning the account.
That does not mean the answer is to abandon school-level marketing.
It means school-level demand now needs to connect to a clearer trust-level case.
Because in much of the market, the challenge is no longer simply getting a school to like what you do.
It is helping the right people see that it makes sense to adopt it across a system.
