One might think that selling into schools is the last area of work to find con tricks and dubious practice, but in the nine years since the daily Education Marketing news service was launched we seem to have covered loads of such practices.

These are not, generally speaking, practices in terms of the actual selling into schools, but rather the selling of marketing products and services to companies that sell into schools.

I am not quite sure why this is, but there certainly are some services that I would say, “beware of” and it is a fact that every few weeks I am emailed or called with details of another dodgy practice.

What I thought might be of interest would be to gather together some of the practices that I have been told about, and instead of just writing them in the Education Marketing daily emails I would put them into a series of blog articles.   And that is what will follow on this site over the next few days.

But I would like to start with one word of caution.

Hamilton House Mailings, the company that runs this blog and for whom I work, is itself in the business of selling education marketing services.  We sell email lists, direct mail lists, and marketing services.   So you might well feel that this is merely an attempt by Hamilton House to attack its competitors.  If so, do disregard all that follows.

By way of introduction, here’s one of the scams…

A caller announces that the government has said that from the start of next term schools will only be able to access web sites that are registered on a new intranet.  All sites that are not registered will be unavailable to schools, and so teachers will not be able to see details of products and services advertised to schools.

Then in a curious switch of direction the caller says they are sending out hundreds of thousands of items to schools to remind them of which firms are now supporting this initiative.  The link between these new items and the supposed government change is never clearly given.

Of course the sale point can be anything – it could be another web site, a set of mousemats, a memory stick or anything else.

The con of course is that the government policy doesn’t exist.  If you are approached and you think there might be something in this, then you simply need to clarify the legislation or some other detail of the change, type it into Google, and verify that this major change exists.

In terms of a walled-in approach to web sites, I can say for certain that this is not on the agenda.  Schools are protected either through their own devices, or through approaches that they buy via the local Grid for Learning.  It is not a government controlled policy.

As to whether or not the items sent out to teachers to tell them about the policy actually exist, the answer is probably not – not least because the policy doesn’t exist either.

Links

The Education Marketing Blog: www.blog.educationmarketing.org.uk

The Education Marketing daily news service – send an email to education-marketing-subscribe@yahoogroups.com and then reply to the email you are sent back.   The service has over 1200 subscribers, and covers all aspects of selling into schools.  It is completely free.

The Education Marketing web site: www.educationmarketing.org.uk