WordPress and private school
A school site on WordPress, and the documents it deliberately withholds
Schools gate their best material on purpose. The prospectus arrives after a form, the full fee schedule is sent by the bursary office, and the term calendar is a file linked from a page nobody visits twice. That is a marketing decision and it is a perfectly reasonable one, but it means the two documents that answer nearly every parent's question are not published in any sense a crawl understands. Deciding what the assistant may say about a document it is not allowed to publish is the actual work here.
Why this pairing is its own job
The WordPress install guide covers the tag, and the private school guide covers what the assistant has to know. What follows is the part that belongs to neither.
- The prospectus and the full fee schedule sit behind a request form. They are the material, and they are gated on purpose, so the question is not how to reach them but what the assistant is permitted to say once you upload them yourself.
- The parent portal is a separate origin, usually run by a school management supplier. It holds reports, invoices and messages, none of which the assistant can read, and it is a place the launcher should not appear even if you could put it there.
- Safeguarding decides scope before anything else does. A parent facing assistant on an admissions page is an admissions tool. Anything a pupil can reach is a channel into the school for a child, and that is a decision for the safeguarding lead rather than for whoever manages the website.
- Term dates, uniform lists and the joining pack are files rather than pages on almost every school site, which puts the most repetitive questions a school office answers in the one format a crawl following navigation is worst at reaching.
What changes about the install here
<script src="https://cdn.askably.xyz/w.js" data-key="pk_live_YOUR_KEY" defer></script>The tag is the same one on the WordPress guide. Everything below is about where it goes on a private school site specifically.
Upload the gated documents, then decide what may be quoted from them
Uploading the prospectus and the fee schedule as sources does not publish them. It lets the assistant answer from them, which is a different thing, and it means a parent gets the termly figure at nine at night instead of a form and a wait.
That is a decision the school has to make deliberately rather than discover. Some schools are happy for fees to be answered directly, since the number is on the invoice eventually anyway. Others gate the prospectus precisely to capture the enquiry, and for them the right setup is to index the admissions timeline and the fee structure while leaving the prospectus itself out.
Whichever you choose, index the whole fee picture rather than the headline. A termly tuition figure quoted without the compulsory lunch charge, the registration deposit or the examination fees is an incomplete price given in the school's name, and parents notice at the first invoice rather than at the open morning.
Leave the parent portal off, and say so out loud
The portal runs on the supplier's address, so the tag was never printed there and there is nothing to remove. Leave that origin off the allowlist as a recorded decision rather than an omission, because somebody will eventually suggest putting it there to help parents find things.
The reason to say no is not technical. A portal is where a parent goes when something is wrong with an invoice or a report, and a chat panel that cannot see either of those is an invitation to type a private matter into a box that will email it to a general address.
Settle the pupil question before the tag goes live
Decide with the safeguarding lead whether any page a pupil routinely uses will carry the launcher, and exclude those pages in the snippet if the answer is no. Do it at install time, because a decision taken afterwards is taken after the first message has already arrived.
Write the safeguarding wording into the refusal itself. A message that reads as a disclosure has to produce the school's published route and a phone number in the first reply, without follow up questions and without reassurance. If the school has not agreed that wording yet, that is the thing to finish before the install rather than after.
Where the answerable material lives
| The fee schedule, extras included | Termly tuition by year group, registration and acceptance deposits, and the compulsory extras: lunches, trips, instrumental lessons, examination entries. The gap between the headline fee and the actual invoice is the most common complaint in this trade, and indexing the whole schedule closes it. |
|---|---|
| The admissions timeline, per entry point | Registration deadlines, assessment dates, offer dates and acceptance deadlines, listed for each entry year separately. A parent looking at entry at seven has no use for the sixth form dates, and one blended calendar page produces answers that mix the two. |
| The joining pack files | Uniform list with the required and optional split, the supplier, the second hand arrangement, term dates and the equipment list. These are uploads rather than pages on most school sites, and they are the questions the school office answers most often. |
| Bursary and scholarship policy, not the marketing page | What each award is, how means testing works where it applies, what evidence a family supplies and the closing dates. The policy document answers the follow up questions, which is what the marketing page never does. |
The first thing to get right
Agree with the head or the bursar which gated documents may be answered from, and write that down, before uploading anything.
Every other setup step here is reversible. Answering a fee question from a document the school deliberately withholds is a decision about how the school markets itself, and it should be made by the person who decided to gate it rather than by whoever was doing the upload.
The failure that belongs to this combination
A warm question about a named child, answered warmly
Parents ask about their own child constantly and they ask reasonably: whether the offer has gone out, how the assessment went, whether a sibling gets priority. The assistant has nothing to answer from, which is the correct state, and it refuses.
The failure is in the wording of that refusal rather than in the fact of it. A flat apology to a parent who has just spent two hours on an application reads as an institution closing a door, and it arrives at exactly the moment the school is trying to be reassuring. Schools get complaints about this that they never get about the assistant being unable to answer anything else.
Write this refusal separately and warmly, name the registrar, and offer to pass the family's details on. Then check it on a message that includes a child's name, because that is the version parents actually send and it is the one you need to read before they do.
Before you go live
- The origin the page is served from has to be on the allowlist for that assistant, or nothing renders and the browser console says which origin was refused. An apex domain and its www are two different origins to a browser, so list both, along with any staging or preview host you want it to work on.
- Open the site as a visitor would, on the pages a private school visitor actually lands on, and ask it something only your own material could answer. A widget that renders is not the same as a widget that has read anything.
Questions
- Can we let it answer fee questions from the schedule we normally send on request?
- You can, and many schools should. Uploading a document as a source does not publish it, so the parent gets the figure without the file. It is still a marketing decision rather than a technical one, so take it with whoever decided to gate the document in the first place.
- Should the widget be on the parent portal?
- No. The portal is on your management supplier's address, so nothing you do on your site puts it there, and that is the right outcome. Parents reach the portal when something is wrong with an invoice or a report, and neither of those is something an assistant can see.
- What happens if a pupil types something worrying into it?
- It must name the school's published safeguarding route and a phone number, and do nothing else: no follow up questions, no reassurance, no taking of a report. Put that wording in the refusal message itself, and agree it with the safeguarding lead before the tag goes live rather than after.
Keep reading
- Installing on WordPressHook the tag into wp_footer with a snippet plugin, keep it out of the theme, and stop optimisation plugins from deferring it away.
- Everything for a private schoolAdmissions timelines, fees, bursaries and uniform lists are safe ground for a school assistant. Anything about a named pupil or applicant is not.
- The menu is the material, and on most restaurant sites it is a downloadMenus published as files, dishes marked with icons instead of words, and a reservation flow that finishes on a booking platform's own domain.
- A trade site full of town pages, and what that does to the answersA page for every town you cover pulls answers to the wrong area, the rate card is a graphic, and a sticky call bar sits where the launcher does.
- The term dates page a school site builds once and forgetsTerm dates sit in a data file and the page shows what was next when the site was last built. A crawl then copies that moment.
- Two school sites, one editor, and one paste between themSchools run the public site and the internal one in the same tool. An embed pasted onto the wrong one is a safeguarding decision, not a change.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.