My perception of teachers is dominated by a series of observations.  You may disagree with them, and that may lead you to go on to develop your own "voice" when preparing advertising for teachers - and of course that is fair enough.  The key issue is that you consciously develop a "voice" which is in keeping with how you perceive teachers to be.

How the teacher perceives his/her role

I feel that teachers perceive themselves as experts who are generally undervalued and misunderstood by society.  They feel that like doctors they have intricate specialist knowledge which the general mass of the population does not have.  However, whereas most of us still allow our GPs to prescribe all sorts of medicines for us and allow surgeons to cut us up, without much of a word of protest, teachers are challenged by both parents and commentators.

For every middle class family that will turn up at parents' evening and say how wonderful it is that the school is teaching their child so well, there is another that demands to know why the child is not doing better.

For every article in the general press praising the work of dedicated self-less teachers who have dedicated a lifetime to helping youngsters find their way in the world, there are a dozen articles pointing to the inability of teachers to maintain discipline, commenting on how standards are falling, noting that teachers are always moaning despite getting 12 weeks holiday a year when the rest of us get four, and so on.

Even the teachers' own newspaper, the Times Educational Supplement, carries regular horror stories of teachers being expelled from teaching because of a failure in their ability, affairs with pupils, helping students cheat in the exams and so on.

In short the dominant vision of teachers seems to me to be, "we don't get the press we deserve".

How the teacher perceives advertisers

As a result of teachers' own perception of their position in society, they are distrustful of the media and consequentially of advertisers.  Teachers emphasise that they know how to teach and that, just as the individual walking in off the street would not be able to take on the role of a GP, so the same individual would fail miserably as a teacher.

Similarly teachers feel that many advertisers simply don't understand what it is really like in the classroom and reject adverts on the grounds that "it wouldn't work here".

Such rejections of advertisements come from two sources - a failure within the advert to meet the basic requirements of presentation and layout as revealed through the psychology of perception, and the use of a voice that says, "We know, you don't".

Of course, most advertisers don't set out to say this in the first place, but many do end up suggesting it through phrases such as "All schools now have a legal obligation to..." or "Would you like to get every child in your class up to Level 4".  Hidden within such phraseology is the notion that the teacher doesn't know what the law requires him/her to do, and isn't already trying to raise the standards of the pupils.   

Thus, successful adverts need to enter the consciousness of the teachers differently - not using a voice that proclaims, "I have the knowledge you don't" or "well you have been struggling along for a long while, but don't worry at last I am here to help you", but instead using a voice that is that of a friend, a partner, an equal, working to overcome the difficulties that the teacher encounters every day.

How the teacher receives mail

Most teachers receive their mail in the staffroom at break time.  They have already taught two or three lessons and now have a few minutes to recover, think about the next lesson, grab a coffee, escape the eagle eye of the deputy head who is trying to find someone to teach an extra lesson because the supply teacher didn't turn up, and (in what is often an overcrowded overheated room) find somewhere to sit.

En route to finding a place to sit the teacher grabs the mail from the pigeon hole.  It might include a couple of internal memos and maybe two or three advertisements and, as the teacher holds a conversation, holds a coffee and keeps an eye out elsewhere, so your leaflet or package is going to try and sell to this teacher.

It is not a promising scenario.

(A few staff will not receive mail like this - the head and deputy head will get their mail in their offices, and in larger schools one or two other staff might have the same privilege.  But for most, the mail is picked up in the staff room.

The resultant voice

When writing to teachers I imagine myself sitting informally with the teachers in a coffee shop.  One says to me, (for example), "The problem is there is virtually no link between GCSE physics and A level physics," and I say, "Yes I know what you mean.  Have you tried..." and off I go into the advert - but it is not really an advert, it is me talking to a friend, offering thoughts, ideas.

Or to give another idea, the teacher says, "It is still the issue of behaviour.  What do we spend - 40%, 50% of each lesson doing things that are designed to keep the kids under control.  If we could be liberated from that, the grades would go through the roof..." and I reply, "One way around this that I've found works..."

This doesn't mean that these are the exact phrases I use.  But rather, when I write headlines I think of these topics and try to lead into them.  As I construct my piece it becomes a monologue, but I am thinking of it as a result of a dialogue.

What I certainly try to avoid is suddenly saying, "And don't forget, we are offering two for the price of one if you buy by the end of January," although that is what my clients often want me to write.  It is of course utterly out of step with the rest of my approach.  If you really want to sell by shouting out as one does in a vegetable market, that's fine - but do it all the way through.  Jumping from one voice to another makes the result laughable.

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