How Do I Increase School Admissions?

Work through these in order. The admissions pages come first because they are where a prospective parent lands, and the open day page comes second because it is the thing every other page should be pointing at.

Open your homepage as a parent who has never heard of you. Term dates, the parent portal login, the lunch menu, this week’s newsletter and a photo of the Year 6 play. All useful to a family already at the school, and none of it answers the question the stranger arrived with: is this the right school for my child and how do I find out more?

A prospective parent searching ‘prep schools near High Wycombe’ or ‘schools with a sixth form’ plus the town needs to land on a page that says who you teach, from what age to what age, where you are, what the school is like and how to visit. That page is the one that ranks for the area searches, and on most school websites it does not exist because the homepage is doing two jobs badly.

Give the current parents their own hub, one click from the top, and give the homepage back to the family who is deciding. The homepage then says plainly what kind of school you are, who it suits, where you are and how to see it.

On most school websites the admissions process is a prospectus download, an admissions policy download and a registration form, also a download. Google cannot rank what is inside a PDF against a page that explains the process, and a parent on a phone in the evening is not going to open three documents to find out when the deadline is.

Write the admissions journey as pages. How to visit, how to register, what the assessment or the taster day involves, when the deadlines fall, what happens after an offer and who to ring with a question. Keep the PDFs as downloads for the parents who want them, but put the words on the page.

That set of pages ranks for ‘how to apply’ and ‘entry requirements’ with your name, and it is what the admissions office spends less time explaining on the phone.

Reception, Year 3, Year 7 and sixth form entry are four different parents, often a decade apart, asking different questions. The nursery parent wants to know about settling in and wraparound care. The Year 7 parent wants to know about the assessment and the bus. The sixth form parent wants the subjects, the results and what happens on day one. One admissions page cannot answer all of them, and it ranks for none of the searches they make.

Write a page for each entry point you want more applications to. Who it is for, what the first term looks like, what you look for, how to apply, when to apply and how to visit. Link each one to the open day page and the fees page.

Start with the entry point that fills the school, not all of them at once.

Parents search ‘school fees’ with your name and ‘independent school fees’ with the area before they ever book a visit, and they will find a figure somewhere. If your site says ‘fees available on request’, they assume you are the expensive one and arrive at the open day already doubtful.

Publish a fees page in plain text. The fee per term by stage, what it includes, what is extra, how bursaries and scholarships work and how to ask about them. If there is a sibling discount, say so. A parent who has read it books the visit with the question already answered.

That page is also what AI tools draw on when someone asks what a school in your area charges, so it earns its place twice.

On most school websites the open morning is an entry in a diary widget or a line in the news. A date in a calendar ranks for nothing and tells a parent nothing about what will happen when they turn up.

Give the open day its own page, kept live all year. The next dates, what happens on the morning, who they will meet, how long it takes, whether children should come, what to do if they cannot make a date and a short booking form with as few fields as you can stand. Then point every entry point page, the homepage and the Business Profile at it.

When there is no date set, the page says so and offers a private visit instead. The page never goes dark.

A school website can double its visits and fill no more places, usually because the visits are current parents checking the term dates, pupils looking for the portal, or former pupils looking at the photos.

Put a tracked phone number on the admissions pages, keep the enquiry and open day forms short, and record which entry point each enquiry is for and which page it came from. In Search Console, look at which searches you appear for and whether they are the area, entry point and open day searches you want. If your biggest search is ‘parent portal’, the site is serving the families you already have.

Once you can see enquiries and visit bookings by entry point, you know which page to write next and which year group the website is actually feeding. Report that to the governors instead of the visit count.