A parent who enquired in March
A parent fills in the enquiry form on your website in March, asking about Year 7 entry for next September. The form sends an email to the admissions inbox. The registrar is at an open morning that day. Someone replies with a prospectus link. Nothing else happens. In June, the parent registers their child at the school down the road, which rang them twice and invited them to a taster day.
Meanwhile the admissions spreadsheet has four hundred rows, three colours of highlighting and a column called 'notes' that nobody else can interpret.
Enquiries arrive everywhere and belong nowhere
Fee-paying schools get enquiries through many doors: the website form, phone calls to reception, conversations at open events, emails to the head, siblings of current pupils and, for boarding schools, overseas agents. Most MIS admissions modules start at registration, so the earlier stage, which is where families decide, lives in inboxes and spreadsheets.
- Web form enquiries land in a shared inbox with no owner.
- Phone enquiries to reception are written on paper.
- Nobody records which year group and entry point each family is interested in.
- There is no reminder to follow up, so follow-up depends on memory.
- The head's own contacts never reach the admissions team.
What cold enquiries cost
Every family that goes elsewhere because nobody called back is a pupil and several years of fees lost to you. The admissions team works hard but reactively, with no view of where each family is. Reports to governors about the pipeline are pieced together by hand. And it is impossible to know which marketing actually brings families who register.
The admissions pipeline we build
- Every enquiry, from the website form, a reception phone log, an event sign-up or an agent, creates a family record with the child's details, entry year and point, and the source.
- Each record has a stage (enquiry, visited, taster booked, registered, assessed, offered, accepted) and a named owner in the admissions team.
- Next steps are set with dates, and the team sees a daily list of families to contact.
- Emails to and from the family are logged on the record through a connection to your Microsoft 365 or Google mailbox.
- Personalised follow-up emails, such as invitations to the next open morning for their entry year, are sent from templates you write.
- When a family registers, their details pass into your MIS, such as iSAMS or WCBS, so nobody retypes them.
- A pipeline view shows families by entry year and stage, and which sources lead to registrations.
| Where the enquiry comes from | How it enters the pipeline |
|---|---|
| Website form | Creates the family record directly |
| Phone call to reception | Short form on the reception computer |
| Open event sign-up | Linked to the event booking |
| Overseas agent | Agent submits through their own form |
| Sibling of a current pupil | Created from the existing family in the MIS |
If your MIS admissions module can already handle enquiries well, we will say so and help you set it up rather than build something separate.
An admissions office that sees every family
Every morning the registrar sees who needs a call, a follow-up email or an invitation. Nobody falls through the cracks because the registrar was at an event. The bursar and head can see the pipeline for next September by year group. And when a family registers, their details are already there.
On a normal day in spring, eight new enquiries come in from the website and three by phone. Each has a record by lunchtime, with a named owner and a next step. Two families from January who have not visited get an invitation to the Saturday open morning for their child's entry year.
Signs your enquiries are slipping
- Admissions enquiries sit in a shared inbox.
- Phone enquiries are written on paper at reception.
- Follow-up depends on the registrar remembering.
- You cannot say how many families are at each stage for next September.
- Registration details are retyped into the MIS.