Primary Times - Who Needs a Distributor??
September 27, 2009 by Joe Fogarty
It’s that time of year when hundreds of schools will receive an unsolicited bundle of Primary Times magazines, full with advertisements aimed at children and their parents. Unlike ordinary publications, Primary Times does not have a distributor or retail outlet through which to deliver its advertising - it uses the school secretary and teachers to hand out the magazine, for free, and place it into childrens’ school bags.
The role of a school secretary is not to distribute commercial magazines aimed at children and parents. We recommend that schools refuse to accept unsolicited deliveries of Primary Times, refuse to incur the cost of recycling them and demand that they be returned to sender.
Primary Times is of negligible educational relevance and heavily orientated towards commercial advertising. It does not belong in schools and should be exposed as exploiting schools to deliver cynically packages advertising to children in class.
Primary Times was launched as a magazine for parents, pupils and teachers of primary schools in 1989 in Britain and now has 40 franchises, five of them in the Republic of Ireland – Dublin; Leinster, South, West and North West. Schools receive 4 editions of Primary Times each year with magazines being delivered to school secretaries and claiming to reach 235,000 families per edition.
Magazines are allocated to individual classes to be taken home by children. Advertisers pay between €175 and €1,500 to have their advertisement placed in the magazines which reader surveys found are referred to 7 times per issue at home. Recent advertisements have included those from
- McDonalds’ Lift and Strike
- Toy Story on Ice
- Tesco Computers for Schools
- Cheestrings
- Shopping centres
- Summer camps and theatre schools
The marketing value of this approach is evident in the comment by one advertiser that:
” We have found the magazine very effective as a vehicle to target school going children and their parents”
The role of a school secretary is not to distribute commercial magazines aimed at children and parents. We recommend that schools refuse to place Primary Times in children’s’ schoolbags.
We regard Primary Times as being of negligible educational relevance and heavily orientated towards commercial advertising. These advertisements serve to reinforce existing commercial schemes and, we believe, pressurise parents by promoting expensive private courses/camps and “The Must have Toy” in Christmas editions.
The assumption on the part of Primary Times that schools will blithely act a distribution agent for commercial content is considered disrespectful and exploitative. We request that parents who find copies Primary Times in their child’s schoolbag return them to the school immediately and explain why they feel this is an unsuitable medium for commercial marketing.
The provision of a local events guide or community services directory may be achieved through the use of a folder in the school lobby/entrance area into which all relevant notices are placed. Parents may then consult this material as they choose.
