St Michael's Private Primary School

St Michael's Private Primary School didn't have a design problem so much as a time problem. The posters were getting made. The certificates were getting printed. Someone was always putting something together for the newsletter or the notice board. That someone was usually a teacher or an admin staff member, squeezing it in between the things they were actually meant to be doing — teaching, running a classroom, keeping a school day moving. Design was whatever was left over at the end of a full day, made in whatever software was open, and it looked like it. No consistent brand. No real social media presence showing what was actually happening at the school. Posters, letterheads, and certificates that hadn't moved on in years. A school that, in person, was warm and busy and full of life — and online, barely existed. That's an easy situation to end up in and a hard one to fix on your own. Hiring a full-time designer for a primary school's volume of work doesn't make financial sense. Commissioning every poster and every social post as a one-off job is slow, and it adds up fast, and someone still has to manage it. So in 2024, St Michael's started a social and design retainer with me instead — and it's been running ever since. The retainer covers whatever the school needs to look after, visually, in a given month. That's social media posts, both image and video, announcing what's actually going on — events, achievements, the everyday life of the school that never used to make it past the staff room. It's certificate design, so a child walks away from prize-giving with something that looks like it was made for them, not printed off a template. It's posters for open days and sports days and fêtes. It's the quieter things too — email signatures, letterheads, the small pieces that make a school feel put-together every time a parent sees one. Most months that's somewhere between 12 and 20 pieces, more around exam season or the school's big annual events, fewer in the quieter stretches of term. The point of the retainer isn't really the individual pieces, though. It's what it frees up. Nobody on staff is opening a design program at 8pm anymore. The people who work at St Michael's get to do the job they actually signed up for — teaching and running a school — while someone whose actual job is design handles how it all looks. That's the real value: not just better-looking posters, but one less thing on a very full plate for the people who least have room for it. One piece of the work is worth calling out on its own. Alongside the visual side, I helped set up a WhatsApp channel for the school to communicate directly with parents — a more reliable way to actually reach people than hoping a newsletter gets opened. It's sitting at over 95% retention, which for a parent-communication channel is a genuinely strong number: it means the people who joined are staying, reading, and paying attention, not muting it and moving on. It's a small addition to the retainer that's made a real, measurable difference to how well the school reaches its own community. The social media side has followed the same arc. St Michael's now has a Facebook presence that actually reflects the school — regular posts, a consistent look, real coverage of what's happening rather than long silences between updates. With a 300% percent increase in views alone. What St Michael's has to show for it now is a school that looks, online and on paper, like the place it actually is — current, well cared for, and clearly run by people who take it seriously. Not a redesign that happened once and was left to age again. A relationship that keeps going: new term, new events, new things worth telling parents about, and someone already handling how that gets said and shown. Nothing about a school stays still for long. Term to term, year to year, there's always something new happening worth showing people. That's the whole shape of this retainer: not one finished project, but a partner who shows up for the next one, and the one after that.