Why are we rebranding?
There’s been a lot of changes to the vocational landscape over the last 6 years since iAchieve was first launched. We no longer felt that our branding reflected what we do.
At our very core, we just want to assist schools to give young people access to vocational education by creating high-quality frameworks and resources upon which teachers can rely. We truly believe that vocational qualifications can make a huge difference to students lives.
This year, we ran the iAchieve Inspirational Student Awards and it really reiterated the importance of vocational education. Knowing we’re supporting students who were succeeding despite their dyslexia or difficulties with literacy, for example, was really humbling. There were students who had been supporting their peers and getting involved with the local community and pupils who had dealt with medical issues and refused to let it hold them back.
We felt it was time to inject more of our business’s personality into the brand.
What does our new strapline mean?
Our strapline “inspiring vocational success” is multi-layered in its meaning.
It means that we see teachers using our resources as a jumping board from which to deliver great subjects and inspire their students to succeed.
Inspiring students can mean making them feel they want to do something, and we believe our platform has that effect. Students who may be struggling with school in some way can be inspired to re-engage by having an alternative option that may not previously have been possible for them.
It means we’re inspired by both the teachers delivering vocational subjects and the students succeeding in them. The successes of our iAchieve students doesn’t have to be measured as excellent grades. Success is a subject scale and we want to celebrate and inspire that approach.
What did our research tell us?
During our rebrand, we conducted extensive market research, both from our current customers and from teachers who haven’t used iAchieve before.
75% of teachers using iAchieve said the endorsed materials give them confidence that they’re teaching everything required for the qualification and 50% said they liked that iAchieve materials are matched to the specification, giving them a framework to build lessons from.
37.5% of teachers using iAchieve also said iAchieve helps with offsite provision, with support for frequently changing awarding body rules and specifications, for non-specialists delivering new subject areas and where their school didn’t have a pre-existing resource bank for vocational subjects.
An overwhelming majority voted for the blue colourway of our logo and almost everyone agreed that “Inspiring vocational success” best reflected iAchieve’s purpose and ethos.
We also obtained lots of information about how to develop our product further and what would be most useful in respect of developments.
What’s going to change?
iAchieve customers can rest assured that all the things they love about iAchieve are staying the same. To make things even better, we’re working on further improvements to the product, as well as the brand.
We’ve got a more focused picture of what schools want from us and what we want to be providing. We’ve also started working on improvements to the navigation of the platform and some additional functions such as task setting, so look out for those launching soon!
iAchieve’s purpose is, and always has been, about creating an opportunity for schools to offer vocational courses to learners where they may not have been able to otherwise. We truly believe in the power of vocational qualifications and the lifechanging impact they can have on students, but we also recognise the difficulties and barriers that schools face when trying to implement these options. We strive to overcome these barriers by providing resources which are versatile, comprehensive and easy to use.