Dr Stephen Holmes PhD
Managing Director, Australia and New Zealand

Business Overview
David Roberts BA, MSS, MIPR
Louise Simpson MA, MIPR
Client list and Associates
Knowledge Partnership Associates

"I am delighted to be a founding director of The Knowledge Partnership, an international research, development and consulting practice that specialises in strategy, marketing and communications for the education sector with lead responsibilities for Australia and New Zealand. My consulting background spans almost 10 year across all aspects of education marketing nationally and internationally with schools, colleges and universities. During this time I have become renowned as the leading authority in Australia and New Zealand on education marketing.

My approach to education marketing has always been based on the view that it is a specialist field, requiring both specialist knowledge and empathy for the culture of educational institutions and their staff. I find these essential to make real improvement with my clients. This fits with my own values and ethical position that sees education as critical to the future of a compassionate, and informed world. My position is also that marketing is an educationally sound and supportive concept, and is able to be integrated in both mindset and practice internally and externally through what I have termed the '3R's' of education marketing - 'recruitment, retention and referral'. In doing so, I see education marketing as fundamental to the process of encouraging educational institutions from being product based to adopting a more customer focused outlook. To this end, I continue to write and speak in many forums to this position and value base.

My earlier career provided high-level experience in schools and universities in Australia. Commencing my career as an Economics and History teacher in both government and leading independent schools, and then school administrator and Director of Marketing, I finally moved into the University sector as Executive Director of Marketing in an Australian University.

During these years of professional employment, I undertook post-graduate study to pursue my interests in developing the field of marketing in education with a firm belief that much of the practices being described as education marketing lacked breadth, evidence, rigor and were overly commercial in their origin and focus for educational settings.

My post-graduate professional development began with a Master of Education Administration degree, majoring in cultural change. After finishing an MBA in marketing, I then completed a PhD in 1998 in the field of marketing education, examining how a marketing orientation could become part of the culture in educational institutions. For this dissertation, I was awarded the prestigious Australian College of Education Award for the Most Outstanding Post Graduate Student.

My current academic partnerships include being visiting specialist in Education Marketing at both the University of Queensland and the University of Southern Queensland in Australia. In the near future David Roberts and I will introduce a full scale, university-accredited professional course for education marketers in the UK and Europe, to add to those I have developed and implemented in Australia. I am also the author of The School Marketing Manual, the most successful marketing educational reference ever published in Australia and New Zealand. David and I have recently been approached by publishers Routledge Falmer in the UK, to write a book that focuses on marketing in the higher education sector for the 21st century, a project we plan to undertake in the near future.

I have a vast range of education clients across the Pacific Rim. In 2004, my work for schools, colleges and universities has involved strategic planning and marketing strategy development, market research and evaluation, marketing orientation assessments, staff (academic and non-academic) institutional development in markets through MaXimizE and other tools, institute training programs in customer service and relationships, education marketing conference planning and keynotes, and executive coaching.