Chatsworth Group of Schools
WEB DESIGN F`OR INDEPENDENT SCHOOLS
CASE STUDY
How two soft toys became a brand, one school grew into a group of schools and nurseries, and Three Girls Media became the team behind Chatsworth’s marketing.
Background
Branding usually starts with a mood board. Chatsworth Schools started with two soft toys.
When Anita Gleave first met Three Girls Media in 2019, Chatsworth had just one school and had recently bought two nurseries. She came to us for our early years and nursery expertise, wanting proper branding and websites for the two new sites before anything else. Anita had already produced a pair of children’s soft toys, a dragon and a swan, and was clear about what she wanted: those characters at the heart of the brand, not an afterthought bolted on later.
We brought in an illustrator we’d worked with extensively over the years to build a brand identity around them: a colour palette and character style warm and distinctive enough to carry a nursery’s website, signage and every other touchpoint a parent would see before ever setting foot inside. In a sector where parents are choosing based on trust and first impressions as much as anything else, getting that right mattered more than it might on a typical small business brief.
The two nursery sites went well enough that Anita came straight back and asked us to redesign the website for Chatsworth’s first school, bringing the same care to a different audience: parents choosing a school, not just a nursery place. That was the real brief, even if neither of us quite knew it yet. Not a one-off project, but the start of a relationship that would grow alongside the business for years to come, one acquisition at a time.
What our Client Said
Could not have been more helpful.
Julian and team have been absolutely fantastic in building my website and brand. Their knowledge, expertise and attention to detail is second-to-none and they are always at the end of the phone if ever I have a question.I can’t recommend Three Girls Media highly enough!
The Work
Over the following seven years, Chatsworth expanded steadily: new schools acquired, new nurseries added, eventually a first international school in Riyadh. We built the website for each one as it joined the group. In total, we designed websites for seventeen schools and three nurseries across the relationship, each one structured around the admissions cycle a particular audience actually follows: open days, prospectus downloads, and the specific questions a parent has at each stage of choosing a school. When the group’s first international school opened in Riyadh, the same process was carried across borders, tailored for a new audience rather than rebuilt from scratch.
Alongside the public-facing sites, we also built a CPD platform for Chatsworth’s internal use: a genuinely different kind of project, serving more than 400 teaching, support and head office staff across the group rather than prospective parents. It was evidence that the relationship had grown beyond websites into wider digital infrastructure, something closer to an internal tool than a marketing asset, but built with the same care.
As Chatsworth grew, it built its own marketing department, and we shifted from being an external supplier to working directly alongside that team: briefed by them, reporting to them, embedded in how they planned admissions campaigns and school-year launches rather than waiting for a project to land in our inbox.
In 2025, part of the Chatsworth business was sold. We continue to look after the schools that remain in the group, and in the restructuring that followed, Chatsworth asked us to take on the marketing department’s role in full rather than replace it with a new in-house hire. That now means every head of school and the central admissions team has a direct line to a named member of the Three Girls Media team, backed by a ticketing system so day-to-day requests (website updates, admissions campaigns, term-time changes) get tracked and actioned properly rather than lost in email.
Impact
Chatsworth Schools today is a genuinely different relationship to the one that started with two nursery websites in 2019. We’re no longer a supplier they call when something needs building; we’re the team they call for their marketing, full stop. Heads and admissions staff each have someone at Three Girls Media they know by name, and a system behind that so nothing depends on catching the right person at the right moment.
The two soft toys are still doing their job: Anita’s original nursery branding remains untouched and instantly recognisable, seven years and an ownership change later. Around it, seventeen individually designed school websites and a shared marketing team have grown up, each school keeping its own identity while the relationship behind all of them has only got closer. That’s the part we’re proudest of: not any single website, but a partnership that earned more trust at every stage, until the natural next step was simply to stop treating us as outside the business at all.