DEVELOPMENT
BRINGING SCHOOL COMMUNITIES TOGETHER
FUNDRAISING AS A CHANGE AGENT Bill Friar considers whether fundraising can bring disparate school communities together and concludes it does if you can answer a few key questions successfully.
T
he two Haberdashers’ Elstree Schools – Habs Boys and Habs Girls – share a founder, a governing body and a 100-acre campus some 15 miles northwest of central London. Until recently they shared little else but a tacit agreement to politely but studiously ignore each other’s existence. The schools are separated by a terracotta wall low enough to jump over but, to generations of students and staff, as psychologically insurmountable as the one that separated the Berlins. Governors appointed Gus Lock Headmaster of Habs Boys in 2018 and his Girls’ school counterpart, Rose Hardy, a year later with a mandate to work together and pool resources where possible. They began by gradually merging back-office and support functions – IT, HR, Finance, Estates – eliminating duplicate systems and taking advantage of economies of scale. Despite this harmonisation, the schools and the education they provided remained largely separate and independent. The aim is the best of both worlds – ‘delivering outstanding, single-sex education in a coeducational environment’. There were to be a few cracks in the terracotta, however: as of this year, sixth form students are required to take at least one A-level course at the other school, 26 | schoolmanagementplus.com | Summer 2023
giving them more A-level options and preparing them for the coeducational world that awaits them post-Habs. And few new professional services directors were appointed jointly across the two schools. That included me; I joined the schools as director of development in January 2021, just as the third COVID lockdown began. I knew we needed to answer three questions before we began fundraising. They are basic, but busy schools can easily forget to ask them.
Where are we now?
Unfortunate timing aside, it was an exciting development prospect, particularly as it involved finding common purpose across a pair of schools with such a complex relationship. Here’s what I found in answer to my first question: a nearly 350-year-old boys’ school with a reputation for shaping some of the sharpest young minds in the country, and a younger sister, nearly 200 years its junior, which had speedily caught up with its elder sibling. Over the years they had evolved quite distinct school cultures; they had different traditions, different styles, even different dress codes. They did have two things in common: virtually no fundraising and only sporadic alumni engagement. In some ways this was a blessing; we
Means-blind admissions could build our development effort from the ground up. Or rather, our development efforts, plural. It quickly became obvious we needed separate alumni approaches. We appointed one alumni officer for each school. They work closely together, but one is ‘embedded’ in each school to better understand the needs and interests of that school, their students and their alumni. But how about fundraising?
Where do we want to go?
The schools in 2021 were at different waypoints along their fundraising journey. Though neither had got too far, the Boys’ school had at least made a start, primarily through the odd alumni telephone campaign. The Girls’ school had not attempted even this. And neither school had ever asked their parents for anything.