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From Profiles to Purpose: Building Learner Profiles That Strengthen Enrollment and Retention
By Greg Donnellan, Founder of Plumewood Educational Partners
Independent schools face a dual challenge: enrolling the right students and keeping them year after year. Too often, admissions and retention are treated as separate conversations. In reality, they are two parts of the same cycle.
When you enroll the right students, they thrive. Their classmates thrive alongside them – and everyone stays! Teachers become more effective, the classroom environment is stronger, and families feel more confident in their choice of school. All around confidence turns your school into an organization that markets itself. The experience of your school, becomes the experience that sells your school. Higher retention reduces the size of the annual admissions target, allowing you to focus on the right new enrollments to ensure long-term fit. And with that, your school enters a virtuous cycle:
Right students → Effective teachers → Strong classrooms → Healthy enrollment → Strong reputation → More right-fit families.
The challenge for some is getting this cycle started. That’s where Plumewood’s learner profiles come in.
What Learner Profiles Are — and Are Not
A learner profile is a detailed and operationalized, school-specific framework that describes the kinds of students your institution is best equipped to serve – based on its current design.
Our learner profiles take a data-driven inside-out approach to student fit. Unlike a generic admissions checklist, a well-designed learner profile:
Is grounded in the characteristics and data of real current and recent students.
They categorize students into 4 well-defined categories specific to your school.
Go well beyond academic excellence, including the traits and qualities that reflect your school’s unique definition of educational excellence.
Balances diversity within capacity — ensuring the student body reflects a healthy mix of learners without exceeding what the program can support.
Avoids competing for the “best of the best” in every category, focusing instead on the authentic strengths of your school.
At Plumewood Educational Partners, learner profiles are always customized to the design, values, and language of each school. This creates what we call extreme resonance — profiles sound like they belong to your community, not to a consultant’s template.
We’re able to do this because of the diverse experience of our team. We’ve been teachers, coaches, special educators, division leaders, and enrollment directors. When profiles resonate, faculty and staff school-wide adopt them. They become the common language school uses to discuss student placement in the school. And our process allows this to be done efficiently and effectively.
How Learner Profiles Help Schools
Learner profiles:provide a shared language for evaluating fit of new and current families
allow admissions teams to enroll students who are more likely to thrive — and stay.
Create classroom environments where retention is reinforced by peers as much as by programs.
Give teachers and leaders clarity about the students they serve and the school’s definition of success.
Reduce annual admissions pressure by maintaining stronger year-to-year retention.
Allow a school to analyze both their funnel and student body
Guide leaders in aligning marketing, programming, resource allocation with strategic direction.
The Bigger Picture
Schools that embrace learner profiles report less guesswork, more predictable enrollment, and higher confidence in their long-term planning. They also find that internal and external conversations become clearer and more transparent. Fit is no longer about vague impressions — it’s about alignment with the profile.
The result is a school where admissions drives retention, retention stabilizes enrollment, and leaders can focus on objectives with confidence.
Learner profiles are the right solution for meeting your enrollment goals in the competitive private-school marketplace.
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