Promotion and image of vocational education – the perspective of parents of primary and vocational school students

The aim of this study is to identify similarities and differences in how parents of primary and vocational school students perceive the promotion and image of vocational schools, as well as to determine the main areas of divergence. It is assumed that in educational marketing, image represents a set of beliefs, emotions, and perceptions associated with an institution, formed through stakeholders’ experiences. Promotion, in turn, is understood as a multidimensional process that combines informational, persuasive, and image-building functions. The analytical framework assumes that the stakeholder group under study possesses its own set of preferred attributes that determine the identification of an educational service as optimal. They may be identified and evaluated both in relation to the service as a whole and its individual components. Cluster analysis, a statistical tool of exploratory data analysis encompassing various techniques for categorizing collected observations into more homogeneous groups, was employed for inference purposes. The study included 553 parents of final-year primary school students and 502 parents of vocational school students from the Podlaskie region. The findings confirm the unfavorable image of vocational education in the perception of parents.

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