It is Monday morning and the front desk has a sticky note on the monitor: "Mrs Okafor called Sat re Grade 3, call back." Nobody knows who wrote it, which number she called from, or whether someone already rang her on Saturday afternoon. By Wednesday the note has slipped behind the keyboard. By the following week Mrs Okafor has paid a deposit at the school down the road.
Nobody was careless in that story. The school simply had no single place where an enquiry lived, no named owner, and no date by which something had to happen. This post is about fixing exactly that: a routine for tracking enquiries that works on a busy Monday, with whoever happens to be at the desk.
Decide what counts as an enquiry
Schools often under-count enquiries because staff only log the ones that feel serious. A parent who asks about fees at the school gate, a WhatsApp message asking whether there are places in Year 7, a grandparent who walks in to collect a prospectus: all of these are enquiries. If they are not recorded, you cannot follow them up and you cannot learn from them.
A simple rule helps: any contact from a family that does not yet have a child at the school, and that mentions joining, is an enquiry. Existing families asking about a sibling also count, and they are often your warmest leads.
Write the rule down and share it with everyone who answers the phone, staffs reception or manages the school's messages. Security guards and drivers hear more questions than you might expect, so tell them where to send people.
The minimum record, taken in under two minutes
The enquiry record has to be quick to take, or staff will skip it when the desk is busy. Keep the required part short and let the rest be filled in later by the person who follows up.
| Capture at first contact | Add at follow-up |
|---|---|
| Parent or guardian name and phone number | Second contact person and email |
| Child's name and the class they would join | Current school and reason for moving |
| How they contacted you and how they heard of the school | Siblings, special needs or transport questions |
| What they asked about, in their words | Visit booked, or reason not booked |
| Owner and next step with a date | Outcome of each conversation |
The last row of the left column is the one that matters most. An enquiry without an owner and a date is just a note. An enquiry with both is a commitment someone can be held to.
Owners, dates and the morning list
Every enquiry should belong to exactly one person. In a small school that may always be the admissions officer; in a larger one, enquiries might be split by section, so the primary coordinator owns Grade 1 to 5 and the secondary office owns the rest. What matters is that the owner is a named person, not "admissions" or "the office".
Each owner should start the day with a list of the enquiries due for follow-up today, plus any that are overdue. That list is the whole system. If it is visible, people work through it. If it lives in a register on the front desk, it is read only when someone remembers to open it.
Some practical rules that keep the list honest:
- First response the same working day. Families compare several schools at once. Being first to call back with a real answer is a quiet advantage.
- Every contact sets the next step. After each call, record what was said and what happens next, with a date. "Will think about it" becomes "call back Thursday after they talk to her father".
- Cover for absence. When an owner is on leave, their open enquiries move to a colleague for that period. A family should never wait because someone is on holiday.
- Close enquiries deliberately. Mark an enquiry as enrolled, chose another school, not eligible, or no response after a set number of attempts. Closing with a reason is what makes the numbers useful later.
Handling the awkward cases
The routine above covers the tidy enquiry. These are the ones that tend to slip.
The same family, three times
Consider a family where the mother phones, the father walks in two days later, and an aunt messages the following week. Without a family history, that becomes three separate enquiries handled by three people, each starting from nothing. Before creating a new record, search by phone number and child's name. If the family already exists, add to their record and tell the owner.
The enquiry for next year
A parent of a toddler asks about nursery admission in eighteen months. It is tempting to say "call us nearer the time". Instead, log it with a follow-up date a few weeks before your admissions window opens. These families have already chosen to look at you early.
The class that is full
When a class has no places, record the enquiry anyway and mark it as a waiting list. Mid-year leavers happen, and a family that was turned away politely and then called back with an offer remembers that.
The enquiry nobody can answer
Questions about a specific learning need, a fee concession or a transport route often stall because the desk does not know the answer. Record the question, assign the enquiry to someone who does, and tell the family when they will hear back. Silence while you find out reads as disinterest.
Common mistakes
- Logging only phone calls. Messages, emails and website forms arrive in different inboxes and are often forgotten. Bring them into the same list.
- Treating "how did you hear about us" as optional. After one admissions season, this is the field that tells you where your families actually come from.
- Letting enquiries stay open forever. An enquiry list with hundreds of untouched rows from last year hides the ones that need action today.
- Measuring effort instead of outcome. Counting calls made is less useful than counting how many enquiries reached a visit, and how many visits reached enrolment.
A weekly ten-minute review
Once a week, the person responsible for admissions should look at three things: enquiries that are overdue, enquiries received with no owner, and enquiries closed in the past week with their reasons. Overdue items show where capacity is short. Unowned items show where the process leaks. Closure reasons show what families are telling you, for example that fees were the issue, or that transport did not cover their area.
Keep the review short and regular. Its job is not to analyse the season but to catch the Mrs Okafor note before it slips behind the keyboard.
Where this fits
Enquiry tracking is the first stage of the wider admissions pipeline covered in our school admissions management guide, which follows the family through visits, assessments, offers and the first week. If you want the enquiry record, its follow-up history and the family's earlier contacts kept in one place, the front office module in Scolvia tracks who followed up each enquiry and carries the family's details through to admission without retyping.