John Wallis Academy: Staff recruitment campaign 2025

Often, a school will assume that a ‘rebranding’ project has to be a step towards a long term goal – something that they need to invest in now to see future results in 12-18 months’ time. However, that is not always the case and the recent design and school marketing projects we have delivered to long-standing client The John Wallis Academy is a great example of how we can achieve instant impact within a few weeks of a brand relaunch.

The Context

The previous JWA brand was created by Cleverbox around five years ago and had served the school well as a strong foundation on which to build local recognition as a successful environment in which to teach and to learn. Within those five years the school had continued to attain a fantastic reputation for achievement, value added, as well as strong leadership and direction. The time to build the brand forwards and showcase its ambitions was perfect.

Initial conversations began in March 2025 and although we had agreed a long-term brand strategy to unveil in the September (more on that in a later post!) there was also a more pressing requirement. As with the whole education sector at present the need to appeal to and recruit the best staff is a key element of any schools success. Our consultancy sessions with the school underlined all that they had to offer staff, and the challenge now was for us communicate this with confidence to the right audience.

The Solution

Working closely with the academy leadership team we knew that September 2025 called for some confident marketing. Without being brash, we needed to re-emphasise the key messages and strategic intent of the school as well as injecting energy and momentum into the aesthetic. With that end goal agreed our team at Cleverbox were able to work backwards, creating a mini ten-week school recruitment campaign which not only advertised the school to potential staff, but teased the new brand and showed a school not prepared to sit back and rest on its current successes.

Sometimes the most impactful school marketing just requires a little outside-of-the-box thinking. By focusing this campaign on a short term goal whilst also having an awareness of the long term plans of the academy we were able to tailor our ideas to not only attract attention within a key recruitment window – but also begin to launch a re-energised brand that will take the school forward into the next five years.

– Daniel Clackett, Cleverbox MD

We challenged the school to distill its many ‘selling points’ into headline statements; we wanted the messaging to be powerful and memorable and, most importantly, we wanted them to fit on the side of a bus!

Gaining exposure throughout the local community was key to this school marketing campaign. We decided to elevate the messaging by advertising on key bus routes, both ‘SuperSides’ and rears of buses and around appropriate local bus stops. This was tied in with a short term social media campaign and a recruitment brochure targeted specifically for the audience we were looking to attract. The goal was to ensure the John Wallis brand was recognisable and tied directly to the specific campaign messaging.

The outcome was a real success, the campaign drove significant traffic to the ‘Careers’ section of the academy website with over 380 new users accessing the web address tied to this campaign in its initial week of launch. Website traffic to the overall site increased substantially too, with the recruitment content accounting for 10% of all user traffic throughout March and April and catapulting the Careers section of the site into the top three most visited pages.

Most importantly, all vacant positions were filled.

We are pleased to share that our recent recruitment campaign in partnership with Cleverbox was a resounding success.

This initiative marked a fresh and innovative approach for both our Academy and the wider local area, introducing a new style of advertising that strategically targeted locations with high footfall and potential candidates – whilst promoting the Academy as a whole to local areas in a high vision style. People do not expect you to be on the side of buses! 

Sarah Williams, Academy Marketing Manager

If you would like to start a conversation around how expert school marketing and creative ideas can support your school or MAT ambitions, then please feel free to get in touch and arrange an initial video call.

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