Consider the parents’ evening. Consider the open day when prospective new parents visit the school. Consider the school minibus.

Now at first sight there may not seem to be much that links the school minibus with the days when parents and prospective parents are in your school.

But if you’ve got a smart, clean minibus with the school’s logo on the side parked just beyond the door that the parents will enter, you are making quite a statement.  A statement that says, “this school is involved in the education of the whole child – we go beyond the classroom.”

Of course, it is possible to go a lot further.  Having got your smart and clean minibus in the car park, the next thing you should ensure you do is have a picture of it (with students inside, waving – but obviously not leaning – out of the windows) and put that in the prospectus.

You can put the minibus on your website too – indeed it is increasingly common to feature the minibus with students on the home page of the website. 

What such pictures say is, “This school is adventurous.  This school has activities beyond the classroom.  This school lays on extra-curricular activities.”  Of course, to you it might just be a picture of a minibus with students in it, but still it does carry all these messages.

And, as always, if the picture clearly shows the bus with the school’s crest and name on the side, so much the better.

Next, in both the printed prospectus and on the website you can put further information concerning the use of the bus, the clubs and lessons that benefit from it, and so forth.

Of course, if your minibus is rather old and looking the worse for wear (or indeed if you don’t yet have a minibus) there is a problem – but it is easily one that can be overcome.

Because there is no need to save school funds to buy a minibus.  The easiest route forward is to lease the minibus.  In this way you get the funding  spread over a number of years plus the bus serviced on a regular basis.

If you’d like to know more about leasing a minibus for your school do take a look at our website at www.minibusleasing.co.uk/school-minibus.php

If you would like more information please email us at Minibus@benchmarkleasing.co.uk or call us on 01753 859 944.

If, however, you would like to go back and read our past commentaries these are on www.minibusleasingblog.co.uk/