How we worked out what ‘Brooksbank’ sounds like.
Director of Communications, Joëlle McNichol describes the process of distilling the voice of a school looking ahead. The story of the messaging, the prospectus and the film behind The Brooksbank School's 2025 open evening.
Brooksbank had already done the hard part by the time we started this piece of work. Ofsted had called it ‘a school transformed’, results were breaking records for the second year running, and morale among staff and students was the best it had been in a long time. Emily Fewtrell, the school's communications manager, had spent 18 months tirelessly putting real stories in front of families, with students succeeding in sport and the arts and the classroom, a newsletter people actually read, and a steady presence in the local press. It was paying off in what families were saying about the school.
What Brooksbank did not yet have was a settled way of describing itself over the next few years, because the message up to that point had been about bouncing back, and bouncing back was no longer the story. The brief was to move beyond that into something confident enough to match where the school had got to, and to say it in a way that sounded like the people who work there. This was the second stage of brand development at the school, following a refresh of the very dated logo and colour scheme two years earlier. It was never a rebrand, but a development and strengthening of the school’s distinctive self image.
Starting with what was already true
We sat down with Darren Atkinson, the headteacher, Dave Hewitt, the executive headteacher who had been instrumental in the school's turnaround, along with Emily Fewtrell, Nicola Davies, the school business manager, and Damian Ball and Jamie Cooper, senior staff working closely with the schools student leaders. We talked about how they saw Brooksbank, what parents and students were saying, what came up in Facebook comments, and where they wanted the school to be next.
Three things we knew. Brooksbank has been in Elland for more than three hundred years and generations of the same families have walked through its doors. The community has a deep connection to have with a place. It also has a serious sporting history, having been a specialist sports college, with facilities the local community hires and alumni who have gone on to Commonwealth Games medals and international teams, so the sporting reputation is something people locally already know. And the people who lead the school are direct, down to earth and very Yorkshire, with nothing pretentious about how any of them speak. Dave Hewitt in particular is a brilliant communicator with no interest in polish for its own sake, and any voice we developed had to sound like that or nobody inside the school would have believed a word of it.
A slide of early ideas drawn from our initial conversations, from a presentation to school leaders
Two routes, one decision
We went away, distilled all of that down, and came back to the same group with two concepts.
Team Brooksbank took the feeling of being part of a winning side and applied it to a school, with bold colours, celebration imagery, and the idea that you do not just attend Brooksbank, you join it. A school Yorkshire can be proud of went at it from another angle, northern by nature and national by standard, down to earth but uncompromising on standards, with students photographed against dramatic Yorkshire landscapes and northern cities.
They liked both, and chose Team Brooksbank because it felt more distinctive and because staff could get behind it on the night of an open evening in a way a photographic concept could not. We had been talking about a match day atmosphere, but for education, and you could see that being taken up by curriculum areas around the school.
The other concept was far from wasted, because it shaped the tone of voice, it gave us the reference that inspired the film, and its fingerprints are all over the final script. Presenting two routes and letting the school steer is not a formality. It is how you find out what a school actually recognises in itself.
“We bleed blue”
The phrase that anchored the whole thing came out of a conversation with the school business manager, describing that ‘once a Brooksbank student always a Brooksbank student’ feeling. We did not invent it, we noticed it.
The prospectus built out from there, opening with the head talking about a blue thread running through everything, and covering results, community, opportunity, pastoral care and being part of Together. The thing that matters most about it is that it reads like a school talking rather than a brochure.
Graphic pages from the prospectus.
Some of these also became posters around the school.
For the film we took our cue from a spoken word piece about Manchester, all pride and grit and no gloss, which had exactly the quality we were after. We wrote something in that register, workshopped it with two students, and they performed it. We got the whole of Year 7 cheering, shot from a drone, cut in sports day footage of students roaring each other on and some archive clips of the school's history, and made sure the team spirit idea covered labs and stages as well as pitches, because that competitive enjoyment is not only about sport.
