Your Local Reputation, Looked After All Year
Word of mouth is the second thing parents rely on when they choose a primary school — ahead of your website, ahead of Ofsted. We run your school's social media so the thing people say about you is the thing you'd want them to say.
Nothing goes live unapproved
Every post is checked against your consent register and signed off by you before it publishes.
Ten minutes of your week
Your staff drop photographs in a folder. We do the rest.
Built round your admissions year
Not a generic calendar. Ours knows when your open events are and when applications close.
This isn't communications. It's admissions.
A Cambridge University study asked 282 parents where they got their information when choosing a school. Open days came first. Word of mouth came second — ahead of school websites, ahead of Ofsted reports, and well ahead of the Department for Education's performance tables.
You cannot buy word of mouth. But you can feed it. A school that posts something warm and ordinary once a week is a school local parents have an impression of before they ever go looking for one — and it's the school whose name comes up at the toddler group.
A dormant page does the opposite. A parent who finds your last post was in March draws a conclusion, and it isn't about your social media.
And Google took your reviews away
30 April 2025
Google removed reviews and star ratings from every business profile categorised as a school — worldwide, state and independent alike. Historical reviews were deleted rather than hidden. New ones can't be left at all.
Google classes schools alongside hospitals as critical services and did it to protect them from review-bombing, which is fair enough. But it means the one place parents used to look now says nothing.
So the impression a family forms comes from whatever else is on that first screen: your website, your Ofsted report, and your social media. Two of those you can't change this term.
There's more on where reviews live now, and how to ask for them without it feeling grubby, in our guide to managing your online reputation.
Three ways we can help
Most schools take the middle one. All three assume you have better things to do than think about Instagram on a Sunday night.
Set it up properly
- Page and account ownership fixed, so it isn't tied to one member of staff
- Admin roles set correctly, Facebook and Instagram linked
- Consent register built and made usable
- Twelve-month calendar built round your admissions year
- Branded templates your team can reuse
- First month written and scheduled
Then you run it. We're there if you get stuck.
We run it for you
plus the one-off £499 setup
- Starts with the full setup, done properly
- Three to four posts a week, written and scheduled
- Your weekly five-photo round-up of school life
- Open events and deadlines promoted at the right moment
- Comments monitored, anything awkward flagged to you
- One page a month on what actually drove visit bookings
No tie-in. Cancel with a month's notice.
Train your team
- Half a day, on site or online
- Consent and safeguarding in plain English
- What to post, and what never to post
- Filming and photographing on a phone
- The one-hour-a-week routine
- Handling comments without making it worse
Includes the calendar and the templates.
The consent question, answered
This is the real reason most school pages go quiet. Photographs of happy children are the most persuasive thing a school owns, and they're also the thing everybody is frightened of getting wrong — so a lot of schools end up posting nothing at all.
Faces are your strongest photographs. Not every post needs one.
A properly consented picture of a child enjoying their school day is the best image you have, and it should be working hard — on your website, in your prospectus, on your open day poster, in your campaign. That's what a proper shoot is for, and it's where the consent gets sorted out once, carefully, for the pictures that matter most.
What those photographs can't do is carry forty weeks of posting. If every post needs a consented face, then every child you're unsure about becomes a reason to post nothing — and the page goes quiet in November and stays quiet until July.
So the weekly rhythm runs on everything else as well. Work on a desk. Hands planting something. A wide shot of a busy classroom. Muddy boots by the door after forest school. The reading corner on a wet Tuesday. None of those needs a consent form, and they say things a posed group photograph never does.
We build you a consent register that whoever is posting can actually see, and we check every image against it. If there is any doubt about a face, it doesn't go in — and the post still works.
The rule your governors will want to hear: if you wouldn't put it on the school website, we don't put it on social media.
How it works
The whole thing is built round the fact that nobody in your building has a spare hour.
Your staff snap
Photographs go into a shared folder or a WhatsApp group as they happen. No editing, no thinking.
We build the week
We choose, check against your consent register, design and write. Captions stay short.
You approve
One link, one look, one tap. Usually under ten minutes.
It goes out
Scheduled across the week, so the page looks alive rather than posted all at once on a Friday.
What we will and won't do
We will
Show your breakfast club, your after-school clubs, your forest school, the residential — the things you're quietly proud of and never mention. Promote your open events, and say your application deadline out loud in November when it still helps. Tell you when a comment needs a human answer.
We won't
Post anything about behaviour or a named child. Argue with anybody in public. Chase follower counts. Put a face online without your say-so. Or pretend likes are the point — the only number that matters is how many families booked a visit.
If you'd rather keep it in house
Then pay somebody for it, rather than adding it to a job
Most schools don't realise there are legitimate routes. A TLR3 is designed for exactly this kind of fixed-term, project-shaped responsibility, and is worth between £702 and £3,478 in 2025-26. Usefully, the pro-rata principle doesn't apply to TLR3 — a part-time teacher receives the full amount, not a fraction of it.
For support staff there are overtime, honorarium and contract-variation routes, and plenty of schools simply create a three-hour-a-week communications role.
What a head can't do is quietly add it to somebody's Tuesday. Done properly it's about an hour a week, it's real work, and it should be paid for and written down. There's more on all three routes here.
See what parents currently find
Send us your school's name and we'll tell you what a prospective parent sees when they search for it — your listing, your social, what ranks and what doesn't. No charge, and no obligation to do anything about it.