'Why Don’t You Do Chess in Our School?'

Why don’t you do chess in our school?

It’s a good question and one I am asked on a very regular basis.

Over the Easter period, I tried to email every primary school on Teesside to alert them to what CSC has to offer. I say ‘tried’ because some schools didn’t have an email address on their website. Some had contact forms instead but others had no visible means of entertaining electronic communication.

A number of schools had obsolete or invalid email addresses displayed on their websites, leading to instant ‘bounce backs’.

However, despite such obstacles, I was still able to send emails to the vast majority of our local primary schools.

Three schools from 250+ replied, expressing an interest and requesting further information.

Two of the three have yet to reply to my follow-up emails.

One of the three did reply – and quickly – and I am delighted to say they signed up for the CSC curriculum sessions for the school year 2018-9. We have also arranged some starter sessions for the end of this term – at no extra cost to the school.

It was a time-consuming exercise, ‘just’ to sign up one new school. Was it worth it? Yes - because I signed up one new school!

I know some emails will end up in spam boxes or be filtered out by staff who think they are not relevant to their school. They are probably inundated on a daily basis. Even when parents give to me a named contact and tell me that the person in question has been actively seeking information the replies are very few and very far between.

Nevertheless, we do continue to make progress and we are definitely actively seeking new schools.

I wouldn’t bother contacting schools if I thought we had nothing to offer. I genuinely believe the work we do will have a very positive impact wherever we go. Just ask the schools who currently are in our system. Or take a glance at our CSC Teesside blog, Facebook page and Twitter to see news and reports of just some of our activities and special events.

Why don’t we do chess in your school? Ask your school and you could help to make it happen. If YOUR school is interested you can help the process by guiding them to this page, where they can sign up for further details.