Six weeks of answering the same twenty questions: admissions season at a private school

Admissions season at a private school or training centre has a shape everyone who has lived through it recognises. For roughly six weeks, two or three staff stop doing the job they were hired for and become a call centre.

The questions are not hard. That is what makes it so frustrating.

The twenty questions

Write down every enquiry for one week and you will find the same list, in roughly this order of frequency:

• What are the requirements for this programme?
• When is the deadline?
• How much are the fees, and can they be paid in instalments?
• What documents do I need to bring?
• Is there still space?
• Do you accept a transfer from another school?
• Where exactly are you, and what are the office hours?

Seven questions, asked hundreds of times, in two languages, mostly on WhatsApp, mostly outside office hours because the parent asking is at work during office hours.

None of them require judgement. All of them require someone to be free at the exact moment the message arrives — and the one week when nobody is free is the week the deadline falls.

What that costs, beyond the staff time

The obvious cost is six weeks of three people. The less obvious costs are worse.

Enquiries that go unanswered become enrolments somewhere else. A parent who messages three institutions and hears back from one has effectively made their decision. Response time, not quality of answer, decides a meaningful share of enrolments.

The answers drift. By week four, three staff are giving three slightly different versions of the fee schedule, and one of them is quoting last year's.

Real applications get buried. The genuinely important messages — a completed file, a parent with a complication that needs a decision — sit in the same thread as forty requests for the address.

What to hand over

An agent on the school's WhatsApp number, answering from your own documents: the prospectus, the fee schedule, the requirements list, the calendar. In French and English, at any hour, in the same words every time because it is reading from one source.

Three design decisions matter:

It answers from your documents, not from general knowledge. If the fee schedule changes, you change the document and every answer changes with it. This is the difference between a useful system and a machine that confidently invents a deadline.

It hands over the moment a decision is involved. A parent asking about the fee schedule is a question. A parent asking whether their child's transfer credits will be accepted is a decision, and it goes to a person with the whole conversation attached. That line is written down before launch, by you.

It collects rather than just answers. The genuinely valuable version does not stop at answering — it takes the applicant's name, programme of interest and contact details, and drops them into a list. By the end of the season you have a record of everyone who enquired, not just of everyone who enrolled. That list is next year's marketing.

What to keep with people

Anything involving a decision, an exception, a complaint or money already paid. Anything where a parent is upset. Anything about a specific child's situation.

Not because a machine could not string a sentence together about it, but because those conversations are where an institution earns its reputation, and they are exactly the conversations your staff currently have no time for because they answered the address question forty times.

That is the actual argument. It is not about replacing anybody. It is about your admissions team spending the season on the fifteen conversations that decide enrolments instead of the four hundred that do not.

The part that outlasts the season

Once the agent exists, the same setup covers the rest of the year at almost no extra cost: fee reminders, results enquiries, term dates, re-enrolment. The six-week crisis becomes a system that runs all year.

And the records underneath it — enquiries, applications, fees matched to mobile money payments — are the thing that stops a four-year-old student file taking a morning to find.

What we would ask you first

• How many enquiries did you receive last season, and how many did you answer?
• How many of those became applications? Do you know?
• Where does the fee schedule live, and how many versions of it are circulating?
• What percentage of enquiries arrive outside office hours?

That last number is usually the one that settles the argument.