Brandwatch Bulletin #85: Back To School, Back To Reality

Homework rears its ugly head.

27 August 2021

Welcome to the end of the week. Today we’re announcing a change to when we send bulletins out, and we’re looking at back to school data.

Let’s get to it.

Subscribe to the Brandwatch Bulletin

A quick update on the Brandwatch Bulletin

Before we get to today’s bulletin, we have a quick announcement. From now on we’ll be sending out bulletins on Fridays only. This shift to one bulletin a week will enable us to increase the quality, dive deeper into our topics, bring in more voices, and generally give you, our readers, a better piece of work to enjoy.

We’re looking forward to this switch, and we hope you are too.

Now, back to your regularly scheduled programming.

The hopes and the worries

Going back to school is often a despairing time for students as they leave the free and easy days of summer behind. For parents, it can be one of relief as they regain full (or at least some) control of the home and claw back some fleeting peace and quiet.

Covid-19, in some ways, flipped this. During the pandemic, kids have faced months more of being trapped at home and away from their friends. Meanwhile parents had to figure out how to make sure their kids were equipped and able to study from home, alongside dealing with everything else the pandemic brought.

With this in mind, we’ve used Brandwatch Consumer Research to get an idea of what the “back to school” conversation has been like online over the past few years. For the purpose of this bulletin, when we refer to “back to school” this includes going back to college, university, and other educational institutions.

First, let’s look at how the size of the conversation has changed since 2018.

We can see a trend across all years where the conversation peaks in August but also has an extra bump in January as kids go back to school after the New Year. While this occurs in 2020 and 2021, we can see there’s a lot more going on in these years.

In 2020, “back to school” mentions jumped up in March, and stayed much higher than normal until the usual summer spike. This was of course due to Covid, and generally referred to schools closing and what would happen when they reopened and students returned.

The first few months of 2021 were also more volatile than usual for the same reasons, although things settled down in the run up to summer. At that point, the data nearly looked back to normal, with the spike coming a little earlier when compared to 2018 and 2019.

Next we wanted to see how people are feeling about returning to school. To do this we used our Social Panels technology to segment our data by posts from parents, students, and teachers.

When looking at the conversations as a whole, joyful mentions are the most common. For students, many are excited to go back after the trying times of the pandemic so far, while teachers are the same. Both groups are clearly happy about a return to some semblance of normalcy and the chance to learn in-person and see their friends and colleagues.

Parents are the exception though, with “sad” mentions making up the biggest chunk of their mentions. There are a mix of reasons why. Many parents are sad to see their kids less, but there’s also a lot of concern about the health and safety of their kids returning to school.

We can see this reflected in the general “back to school” conversation when we look at some Covid-related topics.

While people aren’t specifically referring to Covid-19 as much this year as they were in 2020, there’s still plenty of concern about it. Masks are being mentioned just as much in 2021 as in 2020, while vaccine mentions have shot up now they’re widely available.

The conversation is a very mixed bag from parents worried about kids not being vaccinated to others being against students having masks enforced. What’s clear though is that Covid-19 and how it’s tackled within the education system is at the top of many people’s minds.

The school shop

We also looked at what products people were talking about in relation to going back to school. Unsurprisingly there was a fair amount of tech products, with laptops and tablets way out in front. Clothing was another big topic.

While this doesn’t tell us much, we can see an interesting change in laptop and clothing mentions when we look back a few years.

Starting with laptops, mentions of these spiked in 2020 in the build up to the new school year. With millions of kids now having to work from home, owning a laptop became an essential for many, and at least a good-to-have for everyone else. There was also a lot of support for ensuring schools could supply laptops to students themselves.

Come 2021 and the conversation has died back down. Not only will less students studying from home have had an effect, many will be using the laptops they got last year. This suggests laptop demand from students may be historically low this year.

Clothing on the other hand has seen a different trend. Mentions dropped dramatically in 2020, and why wouldn’t they? If you’ll be housebound while studying, you’re less likely to think a brand new wardrobe is as important as usual. And this seems to bear out with clothing mentions rebounding in 2021 as more students physically return to school.

What we can see from all this is that while 2020 was an extremely turbulent time for education, there are signs that things are getting back on track, either through adjustment to the “new normal” or the old normal beginning to return.

What should we cover next?

Is there a topic, trend, or industry you’d like us to feature in the Brandwatch Bulletin? We want to hear your ideas to make sure our readers are getting what they want. We may even ask to interview you if you’re involved with the topic.

Send any and all ideas to [email protected] and let’s talk.

Thanks for reading

That’s it for today, but we’ll be back next week on Friday. Have a great weekend. And if you were forwarded this email and want in on the action, get subscribed to the Brandwatch Bulletin now.

Stay safe,

The Brandwatch React team