During a presentation to the board at Currey Ingram Academy (TN), I led trustees through an exercise designed to get them thinking about our school’s value proposition. I asked them to imagine a product that costs $50,000 per year and to consider that product in the context of competitors that offer similar options at little to no cost. Through the discussion that followed, I nudged them to think more specifically about what makes our school worth the investment.
One of the most critical jobs heads of school have is to demonstrate an independent school’s value by balancing tangible outcomes with intangible benefits. We act as modern alchemists, blending student growth, parent trust, and faculty excellence into a transformative educational experience and translating that into a compelling, well-defined value proposition that distinguishes our independent school from others.
As school leaders, we know that assessing our value proposition is part art and part science. It involves carefully weighing the overall school experience against the cost. The higher the perceived value, the more a school thrives. Features such as smaller classes, personalized instruction, specialized programs, and a values-based environment are perceived as excellent value for the tuition investment. The challenge is ensuring families fully understand these advantages, which requires us to refine and adapt messaging to meet evolving student and parent needs.
Demonstrating Value
Understanding family motivations is key to aligning messaging and programs with audience needs and ensuring that the value proposition resonates authentically. At Currey Ingram, we started with NAIS’s Jobs-to-Be-Done study on why parents choose independent schools and a key takeaway that the independent school experience should be viewed as a profoundly transformative journey rather than a mere transactional exchange.
The study helped us realize that we want parents to understand they are investing in an ecosystem that fosters growth, support, and lifelong impact. The more we demonstrate this transformation, the stronger our value proposition will be. We intentionally integrated the JTBD framework into our accreditation process and strategic planning to guide discussions about our value proposition and inform several outward-facing goals. For example, despite providing incredible value, we have the highest tuition in our region. We are acutely aware of the perception that we might be overpriced or insensitive to most families’ financial means. As a result, we have committed to keeping tuition increases below benchmarks for the past 11 years. At the same time, we have actively enhanced financial aid, serving more students with more awards, which has been critical for accessibility.
We have also focused on showcasing our school’s value, using both anecdotal and data-driven strategies. Among our anecdotal strategies, we created a “meet our students” marketing campaign, which provides firsthand testimonials from students and parents. In one video, we highlight a testimonial from a student who once struggled with dyslexia but now reads fluently and excels in college.
To validate our credibility in a more data-driven way, I share information sourced from accreditation reports; third-party evaluations; industry recognitions; and parent, student, and alumni surveys with the community through in-person and written communications to staff, parents, and trustees. We use NAIS DASL data to benchmark and compare our school to others in terms of mission, type, enrollment, and budget, offering insights into our operational and financial position. We also track academic performance and extracurricular participation data to showcase evidence of student engagement and success. And post-graduate metrics—such as college placement rates, career readiness, and alumni contributions—illustrate the long-term effectiveness of the school’s education.
Lastly, we developed a resource, a document I call “Essential Questions,” to help families objectively and factually understand the school—and by extension, our value proposition. It features more than 50 questions that every trustee and senior leader should be able to answer regarding governance, the school campus, finances, advancement, tuition and financial aid, staffing and compensation, enrollment, and curriculum.
How to Quantify Value Proposition
A few years ago, I challenged myself to create a graphic representation of our value proposition at Currey Ingram. Despite my obvious bias as head of school, I aimed for objectivity in this endeavor.
In quantifying our value proposition, I focused on calculating and visualizing Currey Ingram’s perceived value relative to experience and cost. For cost, tuition was straightforward to assess, especially when compared to benchmarks and competitors. However, quantifying perceived value required a leap of faith. I found a strong proxy in the data from our annual parent satisfaction survey, specifically the average rating from the “overall satisfaction” question.
The most common feedback from the survey has been that we are too expensive. As a school tailored to students with learning differences that maintains very small class sizes, our model––which requires more staff, especially teachers, it takes to deliver on mission––inherently challenges affordability. For every 4.50 students, we have one full-time equivalent (FTE) teacher; overall, we have one FTE faculty and staff member for every three students. And while I believe, based on years of primarily anecdotal feedback, that parents “wish” tuition were lower, they understand the reason behind the higher tuition.
Another factor that motivated me to quantify our value proposition emerged a few years ago when Currey Ingram experienced increased attrition. More families enrolled their children in schools with newly established learning support programs that offered support for learning differences at a lower cost. Over three years, we learned, through program descriptions and feedback from families who later returned to Currey Ingram, that while these programs provided adequate learning support, they did not match the specialized support available at Currey Ingram.
In creating a graphic representation, I adjusted the perceived value of the program to account for the cost concern using insights from Kevin Graham of Lookout Management, which has conducted independent school surveys for over 25 years. This data shows that perceived value across all NAIS schools is 4.20 out of 5, or 84%. In contrast, in my exercise, Currey Ingram achieved a perceived value of 4.50 out of 5, or 90%, over the past 11 years.
Source: Currey Ingram School
To explain the graphic: the first bar represents the perceived value of all NAIS schools, based on cost and data from hundreds of independent school surveys conducted over the past 25 years. The second bar depicts Currey Ingram Academy’s perceived value from 11 years of surveys, eliminating cost as a factor. The third bar includes the cost for Currey Ingram, which decreases its value proposition. The fourth bar shows the perceived value of Middle Tennessee independent learning support programs, drawing on our knowledge and parent feedback. The final bar factors in the lower cost of those schools and programs compared to Currey Ingram, resulting in an increased perceived value proposition.
This thought exercise sparked interesting discussions among school leaders and the board about our perceived value. As a direct result of this exercise, we felt we had better objective evidence that our tuition was indeed perceived as “worth it.”
Blending the Elements
The independent school experience is not merely a transactional educational choice; it is a transformative investment that impacts students for a lifetime. Schools that effectively demonstrate their value proposition do so through compelling storytelling, strategic data collection, and a steadfast commitment to mission-driven excellence. Like an alchemist perfecting an elixir, a school leader must carefully blend these elements. Doing so ensures that the institution offers an experience that is not simply chosen but cherished for generations to come.