Industry · Education
Admissions enquiries arrive at midnight. Fees are still contractual.
Parents ask about places, term dates and fees long after the admissions office has gone home. Scout answers from the prospectus you approved, with a citation, captures the year group and the campaign that produced the enquiry, and books a campus tour — while refusing to quote a fee that is not in a written offer.
عرض توضيحي ببيانات وهمية.
What a school gets
One thread per family, and a record of where the enquiry came from.
Admissions is a pipeline that runs on fragments: a comment on an ad, a DM, a website form, a WhatsApp message from an aunt. This is what the Inbox does with them.
- Every enquiry in one thread
- Ads, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, the website chat and the admissions mailbox land in the same Inbox, against the same contact, so the third message from a family is not treated as a first enquiry. A registrar can leave a Private note, @mention a colleague and assign the thread to the admissions team without the parent seeing any of it.
- Scout answers from the approved prospectus
- Year groups, term dates, curriculum, uniform, transport routes and the admissions process — answered from the documents you published to the knowledge base, with the source cited in the reply. Nothing is answered from the open internet.
- Qualifying questions become Custom fields
- Year group, entry term and source campaign are captured as structured fields on the contact during the conversation, not re-asked by a person the next morning.
- Campus tours and assessment slots booked in the conversation
- The family picks a time inside the thread. Booking is a configured action, so you decide whether it runs automatically or waits for an approval from the admissions team.
- Cohort-wide notices with the replies sorted for you
- A timetable change goes to a year group as a template; the replies come back into the Inbox and automation rules sort them into confirmed, needs-a-call and no-reply. Only the exceptions reach a person.
- Reporting by campaign, so you can see which ad filled the intake
- Conversations, Tags and Custom fields report by source, campaign, year group and team, and download as CSV for the board pack.
Where schools start
Three jobs, each with its own page.
Start with the one that is costing you intake, and add the rest once the guardrails have earned their keep.
- Admissions enquiriesStart hereThe out-of-hours enquiry answered from the prospectus with a citation, the year group and entry term captured as Custom fields, the tour booked — and the fee still only in a written offer.
- Cohort noticesUtility templateOne timetable change to a whole year group, with the replies sorted into confirmed, needs-a-call and no-reply, so only the exceptions reach a person.
- Enquiry qualificationJobThe general case behind admissions: your questions asked up front, the answers written onto the contact, and the thread routed with the reason attached.
What it looks like
00:41, a Year 4 enquiry at Cairo Learning.
A fictional school, used across this site. Follow the thread: what gets answered, what gets refused, and what the admissions office finds in the morning.
00:41 — the message arrives
“Hi, is there still space in Year 4 for September? And how much are the fees?” It came from an Instagram ad, and the admissions office opens at nine.
The answer comes from the prospectus, with a citation
Scout retrieves from the approved admissions documents and answers that Year 4 has places for September 2027. The reply carries its sources — admissions-2027.md, year-groups — so a registrar can check what was said against what was published.
The fee question is refused, not guessed
“Fees are confirmed in writing after the assessment, so I can’t quote a figure here.” A guardrail blocks any fee outside a written offer, including a range, a deposit or a sibling discount.
The qualifying detail is captured
Year group 4, entry September 2027, source: Instagram ad — written to Custom fields on the contact, so the campaign that produced the enquiry is attached to it permanently.
A campus tour is booked instead
Tuesday 11:00. The admissions team is notified and the thread is waiting, qualified, when the office opens.
Later that term: one notice to twenty-eight families
Year 4, September intake, 28 families: “Monday’s class moves to 09:30. Reply OK to confirm, or CALL if that doesn’t work.” Nour Hassan and Dina Saleh reply OK and are marked confirmed; Tarek Fouad replies CALL — school run — and is queued for a person; Youssef Adel has not replied and a reminder is due. The rest never needed a human.
عرض توضيحي ببيانات وهمية.
What it will not do
The refusals are the reason an admissions head can sign this off.
These are guardrails, configured per scenario and visible in the trace. When one fires, the reply is blocked and the conversation is handed to the admissions team rather than improvised.
- No fee quoted or negotiated outside a written offer
- Not a figure, not a range, not a deposit, not a sibling or early-payment discount. Fees are contractual, so they travel in the written offer and nowhere else.
- No place and no assessment outcome promised
- Availability in a year group can be stated if you published it. An offer, a waiting-list position or an assessment result cannot: those are decisions a person makes.
- No discussion of another family's child
- Answers are scoped to the contact in the conversation. A question about a classmate, another family's place or another child's results is refused and handed over.
- No safeguarding judgement
- Anything touching a child's welfare, a disclosure or a dispute between guardians is escalated immediately to a named person. Scout does not assess it, categorise it or reply to it.
- No message to a guardian who has not opted in
- Marketing templates — open days, intake campaigns, re-enrolment pushes — require opt-in, and the opt-out is honoured on the number it arrived from.
- A blocked reply becomes a handover, not silence
- The family is told a colleague will pick it up, the thread is assigned to the admissions team, and the blocked draft and the rule that stopped it stay in the trace for review.
Source: WhatsApp Business Messaging Policy, updated 23 September 2026.
What it costs to send
Term-time notices are utility. Open-day campaigns are not.
A school's messaging bill is decided by category and by the 24-hour window. A reply to a parent who messaged you is a service message; a timetable change to a cohort is a utility template; an open-day invitation to a list that has gone quiet is marketing — and a cohort broadcast is priced per recipient, so a year group of 28 is 28 sends.
- Term-time notice or reminder (Egypt)
- $0.0036
- Utility template: timetable changes, exam and term dates, fee-due reminders, bus delays — anything about an enrolment that already exists. Per recipient.
- Open day or intake campaign (Egypt)
- $0.0644
- Marketing template: promotion to families who have not messaged you inside the window. Opt-in required, and about eighteen times the utility rate for the same text.
- A cohort of 28 families, one utility notice
- 28 × $0.0036
- Broadcasts are billed per recipient, not per send. Multiply by the number of year groups and the number of notices a term before you plan the calendar.
- The parent's reply, and the conversation after it
- Service message
- A message from the customer opens a 24-hour window. Meta began charging for service messages on 1 October 2026, with the first 1,000 per business phone number per month free. An admissions back-and-forth with one family lives inside that window.
Source: Meta WhatsApp per-message rate card, Egypt, retrieved 2 November 2026; category, window and service-message rules from Meta developer documentation.
Meta bills these fees, not us, and we never mark them up. BlendDesk charges for seats and AI resolutions.
What admissions heads ask first.
Do parents know they are talking to AI?
They should, and you control the wording. Scout can introduce itself at the start of a thread, and the handover message names the team taking over. We do not recommend presenting it as a member of staff.
Where does the message text go, and what about child data?
Scout runs on an AI provider configured for your installation, and customer message text is sent to that provider as written to produce a reply. Redaction is not built yet, so a parent naming a child in a message means that name reaches the provider. Which provider, and where it runs, is part of the setup conversation — decide it against your data-protection obligations before you connect a channel.
Can it quote fees?
No, and that is configured rather than hoped for. A guardrail blocks fees, ranges, deposits and discounts outside a written offer; the reply is stopped and the thread goes to the admissions team. If your fees are published and you want them quoted verbatim from that document, that is a decision you make explicitly.
What happens out of term?
Enquiries do not stop in August, which is the point. Scout keeps answering from the prospectus and booking tours; you decide what the handover message says when nobody is in the office, and the thread waits assigned for the first day back.
Can we switch it off?
Per scenario, per channel, per inbox — and immediately. With Scout off, everything still arrives in the Inbox and your team replies with Saved replies and Quick actions. Nothing about the workspace depends on the AI being on.
Do we need WhatsApp Business approval?
Yes. WhatsApp runs on your own Meta business assets and a Cloud API setup, including a verified business and approved message templates. Instagram and Messenger depend on Meta permissions and App Review. We walk the setup with you; we cannot promise availability before Meta grants it.
Point it at your prospectus.
Book a demo and we will load a year's admissions documents into a test workspace, then let you try to make it quote a fee.