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Return to Bulletin Home - November 2006
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ICEF Opens School Owners' Forum ICEF hosted a unique gathering at the Berlin Workshop with its first-ever School Owners' Forum. Sixty-five participants from Mexico, Spain, China, Canada, the US, the UK, New Zealand, Australia, and Cyprus came together for an invitation-only discussion about the specific issues and concerns of the independent school owner. The session was moderated by Mervyn Martin, owner of the Select English and St. Andrew's schools in Cambridge and London, and it was informed by an advance questionnaire circulated to participants. Through their questionnaire responses, school owners indicated a number of priority areas for discussion, including commercial issues, such as the buying and selling of schools, collaborative marketing, and best practices in student services and school operations. As the discussion unfolded, a clear consensus emerged that there was a need for a discussion space for school owners, but that the group should proceed in a way that avoided a cumbersome infrastructure and didn't duplicate the mandates or programmes of existing industry associations. The group identified three priority areas for the ICEF School Owners' Forum going forward:
In response, ICEF has confirmed its intention to support the group's ongoing discussions by maintaining a database of school owners and circulating it among forum participants; scheduling additional forum discussions at ICEF Workshops throughout the world; programming specialised training seminars for school owners in conjunction with ICEF's market intelligence and training seminars at workshop sites; and operating an online discussion forum for the exclusive use of school owners. The next forum discussion for school owners will occur during the ICEF Moscow Workshop in March 2007. The online bulletin board is available now and is hosted on ICEF Online. The online forum features specialised discussion threads in finance, marketing, students services, and other areas of key interest to school owners. With the exception of possible user fees for specialised training seminars, these supports will be made available free of charge to participating school owners. "The ICEF School Owner's Forum in Berlin is a starting point for something that has the potential to grow quite large," says Mervyn Martin. "Whether it does so or not will depend on the value that people get out of it." Independent school owners or part-owners who would like to join the School Owners' Forum, either at ICEF Workshop sites or via the online discussion forum, are invited to email an expression of interest to owners@icef.com.
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