Any school can face situations which have the potential to impact on its reputation. Likewise, unfortunately, sometimes schools face an incident or issue that requires specialist crisis support in terms of communications handling.
Issues of significance can include:
- Unwarranted or unprecedented media attention;
- Critical social media activity;
- Negative school inspections;
- Temporary school closures;
- School mergers or closures;
- Safeguarding issues;
- Incidents occurring in school or on visits, residential trips etc, that have the potential to cause reputational damage;
- Criminal action;
- A tragedy involving a member of the school community;
- Allegations of historic abuse;
- Community/local/world issues that spread into a school;
- Sustained parental, staff or stakeholder opposition;
- Sustained external criticism of a school, its staff or pupils.
As a member of IAPS, you have access to on-call, specialist communications expertise and counsel for dealing with these and other similar issues, provided by 8hwe Ltd; a specialist consultancy with over 20 years’ daily experience of working with schools.
The 8hwe team are well known to us at IAPS and have supported a large number of high-profile schools through all manner of situations, over a long period of time.
Director-level support and advice can be initiated by emailing 8hwe.
As part of membership, Heads can access support on specific issues. In the overwhelming majority of cases, this will be sufficient time to get a sense check or advice on your handling of the issue including, if required, the drafting of core communications materials. Additional support and advice for longer term issues is likewise available for IAPS members at a reduced rate.