Most schools now realise that marketing itself does not mean that it has sold its soul to the Devil and given itself up to the black arts and we are investing in communications and marketing and development; we are investing in evangelists. Every good school needs its evangelists. We need help from them to keep our messages clear and coherent, aspirational but realistic, but the role of marketing in a good school is fulfilled by the whole community rather than by a marketing department. It is undertaken by the governors and staff and parents and the heads of schools from which pupils arrive and by the pupils themselves. However, at Dulwich, our 10,000 OAs are potentially our greatest evangelists. I pray I can encourage them to be so in the years leading up to our 400th anniversary in 2019. Most simply, of course, the good school needs its teachers and its pastoral leaders. The teachers inspire and engage, cajole, compliment and challenge in right measure, and thereby create
a community of good learners. The pastors are the tutors who stand up for their charges (and often for their peers), picking them up when things are not going as well as they should. As the friend who first shared the idea of the five- fold ministry with me said: Libraries of books have been written about leadership and management theory, about personality types and about how to build a team, but I found these 2,000 year old thoughts as helpful as any. I wanted to return the compliment of the text that had been shared with me and I didn’t think I could go better than send a little card quoting the Book of Isaiah (chapter 50, verse 4): The Lord has given me the tongue of a teacher that I might sustain the weary with a word.
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