How [YELLOW CAR] Is Redesigning The Experience Of School Through Listening

In an era where trust must be earned and not assumed, and where young people are seeking something beyond knowledge, like connection, meaning, and agency, one company is helping schools pause and ask: "What is the experience we're creating here?"

[YELLOW CAR], led by duo Dr. David Willows and Suzette Parlevliet, is one of the few experienced strategy firms dedicated exclusively to schools. In industries like retail and hospitality, experience strategy is already a well-established discipline. But as Willows points out, "It's never really ventured very far into education, certainly school-based education. That, for us, was a starting point."

What [YELLOW CAR] has developed is a new way of thinking, measuring, and analysing how students, parents, and staff feel about their time in school. "We work with schools to design an experience for them that is suitable, that tends to their needs emotionally and strategically," Willows says. "And that leads to the question: How do we actually measure that?"

The answer is the Felt Experience Indicator® (FEI), a proprietary diagnostic tool that [YELLOW CAR] developed to dive deep into the emotional and psychological terrain of school life, something that's most often overlooked in traditional school settings.

Conventional methods such as satisfaction surveys or Net Promoter Scores (NPS) may give a number, but as Willows explains, "They don't have impact. Even the NPS has very limited capacity in helping us understand what that experience really is."

By contrast, the Felt Experience Indicator® goes further. It captures experience across six emotional dimensions: happiness, connection, belonging, confidence, gratitude, and understanding. These aren't abstract ideas; they're the invisible foundation of a school's culture. Rather than relying solely on broad ratings, which are prevalent in most schools, the tool uses a layered approach. It combines demographic data, numerical ratings, and open-ended questions that produce what [YELLOW CAR] calls "wavelengths" of felt experience across the school's population.

These wavelengths can reveal real, tangible insights. "We can track whether the wavelength of school increases over time, or does it fluctuate? And if so, in what grades?" Willows says.

Parlevliet adds that the data often uncovers surprising disparities, bringing a deeper question to the table. She states, "Almost always, the students are scoring their experience less positively than the employees or the parents, and that begs the question: why is that a trend, and what can be done to change that?" Perhaps the most transformative element isn't just what the tool measures, but what its results set in motion.

Once feedback is collected, [YELLOW CAR] facilitates co-creation sessions, where students, teachers, and staff come together to analyze findings and brainstorm solutions. "They sit around the same table and try to identify aspects, asking: What are we seeing? What is it telling us?" Parlevliet explains. From there, each group can make a "wish list" of things they'd like to change, often simple, low-cost, high-impact ideas. For them, the firm then helps execute effective solutions that mutually benefit all parties involved.

In one case, teachers expressed a desire for less phone use. Students responded with creative solutions: pouches, lockers, or designated "phone-free" spaces. "What we're hearing from students is, 'We know school can't be exactly how we want it. We just want to be part of the conversation.' And that's the space we provide," Parlevliet says.

[YELLOW CAR]'s methodology thrives on cross-pollination, where they identify patterns across schools and shape them into clear, shareable models. Drawing on insights from hundreds of educators worldwide, they refine tools like the Felt Experience Indicator® to work in diverse contexts. "When we see patterns emerging, we ask how we can simplify this, how can it apply beyond just one school?" Parlevliet says. This iterative process enables [YELLOW CAR] to take hyper-local insights and scale them into universal strategies.

This spirit of intentionality and shared responsibility is at the forefront of [YELLOW CAR]'s ethos. Every school is viewed as a life cycle, a six-stage journey that includes attraction, admission, induction, engagement, retention, and transition. While each stage involves different actors, from marketing teams to admissions officers to classroom teachers, too often, these actors are designed in silos, not as a team.

"What we're noticing is that the perceptions of what's in place are significantly different in almost every school," Parlevliet adds. "That lack of alignment means the experiences are likely misaligned too."

To address this, [YELLOW CAR] offers workshops, integrated reports, and impact plans that bring teams together across departments. From security guards to finance directors, everyone is shown that they are part of the experience, and given a shared language to design and improve it.

Unlike traditional systems, the company's foundation isn't parsing through survey data, but something much beyond. It deciphers the deeper meaning behind patterns. Sometimes, a small story captures the whole. In one school, a broken water tap forced girls to walk across the campus just to access drinking water. The data flagged the issue as a friction point. It was "just a tap" until it wasn't. It became a symbol of systemic oversight. Fixing it didn't just solve a plumbing issue; it affirmed that someone was paying attention.

And that's what the Felt Experience Indicator® sheds light on. Helping to connect the symptoms to the underlying causes, and in doing so, guiding schools to focus not only on what's broken, but what it means.

In a world where students are increasingly disillusioned, parents are anxious, and staff are stretched thin, the act of deep listening becomes radical, and what [YELLOW CAR] offers is a new paradigm, focusing on the quality of the journey over outcomes. In helping schools make the invisible visible, [YELLOW CAR] is reimagining education from the inside out, one felt experience at a time.

[YELLOW CAR] is also exploring how this approach to listening can be relevant beyond school.