What families look for on a boarding school website.

Families looking for a boarding school in Switzerland rarely start with a visit. They start in the evening, at home in Shanghai or Mexico City, with several tabs open and the next school year still some way off. They are often reading in a language that is not the school’s, and in another time zone. By the time they write to ask for a visit or an interview, the shortlist already exists.

That shortlist is drawn up without the school in the room. Nobody from admissions is there to add nuance or explain what the website leaves out. This is why I believe a boarding school’s website does not need to persuade. It needs to answer. Families already know that Switzerland has good schools. What they do not know is whether this one is right for their child. And any question left unanswered will be answered by another school.

A boarding school’s website does not need to persuade. It needs to answer.

Two readers, one screen.

A boarding school’s website has two readers, and they are not asking the same questions. The parents decide and pay. They want to know who will look after their child, which qualification they will leave with, where it can take them and what it will really cost. The student, who may be twelve or seventeen, has to want to go. Their questions are different: what an ordinary Tuesday looks like, what the room is like, who they will sit with at lunch, what happens on a Saturday.

A school that wins over the parents but not the student has done half the job. So I do not write one page for both. I design two paths that cross: one for the parents, laid out like a dossier, and one for the student, which feels more like a guided tour. Sometimes parents and child are not even reading in the same language, so every language version has to be complete, not just the home page.

What reassures parents about to leave their child far from home.

The real question is not the view of the lake. It is who will be there at ten at night if their daughter is ill or homesick. It is easy to answer with a line about the wellbeing of every student. Any school can write that line, which is exactly why it reassures no one.

What reassures them is detail. Who lives in each boarding house, and how many adults sleep there. Who leads on safeguarding, and how to reach them. What happens if a student falls ill on a Sunday. How often the family hears from the school, and from whom. Schools in the British tradition call this pastoral care and safeguarding. Parents call it knowing who they are leaving their child with, and they want names and faces.

For an accredited school, much of this already exists on paper. International accreditation from the Council of International Schools includes standards that assess a school’s child protection policy and practices, and the standards agreed by accreditation and inspection bodies cover, among other things, staff selection and the handling of allegations. The document, in other words, exists. The website’s job is to turn it into sentences a parent can read in their own language, on the page itself, rather than in a PDF linked from the footer.

The same goes for everything else. Before asking to visit, a family wants to find on the website, without having to write to anyone:

• Pastoral care and safeguarding, explained with names and procedures.
• Daily life: a school day, a weekend, the boarding houses and the rooms as they really are.
• The adults: who runs each house, and whom the family should call if something goes wrong.
• The academic programmes, and where they lead.
• The fees, with what they include and what is billed separately.
• The admissions calendar, with every step and its date.

What it costs and where it leads.

Between them, Swiss boarding schools prepare students for Swiss, French, English and American diplomas, as the Federation of Swiss Private Schools points out. To the school, the difference between the Swiss Matura and the International Baccalaureate is obvious. To a family in Seoul, perhaps not. The website has to say plainly which student each programme suits and what further study it opens the door to, without assuming knowledge that only exists in Switzerland.

On fees, I am firmer. A Swiss boarding school is a significant expense, and families know that before they open the website. Hiding the price does not make a school more exclusive. It only adds an email and a wait. I would rather publish the fees with everything they include and everything they do not: accommodation, meals, activities, trips, insurance, language support, deposit. Families who can afford it appreciate the clarity. Those who cannot are spared a conversation, and so is the school.

The admissions calendar deserves the same candour. A family deciding from abroad plans months ahead: a school to leave, sometimes a visa, sometimes a move. They need to see when admissions open, what assessments there are, when the interview takes place and when they will hear back. If that is not on the website, they ask by email, and every email crosses time zones.

Booking a visit in their time zone and their language.

When ‘book a visit’ means filling in a form and waiting, the conversation moves forward one step a day. In winter Shanghai is seven hours ahead of Switzerland; in summer, six, because China does not change its clocks and Switzerland does. If the school replies mid-afternoon, it is already night in Shanghai. The next morning the family reads the proposed times, all in Swiss time, does the arithmetic and replies; the school finds the answer when it opens. One exchange, one day.

I believe ‘book a visit’ should mean something else: seeing the available slots in the family’s local time, with Swiss time beneath, and choosing one. In their language, Chinese included, with their own date format. With the confirmation in that same language and, for a video interview, the link already included. Nobody has to work out the time difference, and nobody waits a day for an answer the website could have given on its own.

I include Simplified Chinese in every website I build, and for a boarding school I consider it essential. A parent who reads Chinese is better placed to judge, in Chinese, whether their child will be well looked after. A website that translates the home page but leaves the fees and the safeguarding policy in English tells them something the school never meant to say.

Summer camp, the first way in.

The Federation of Swiss Private Schools presents its members’ summer courses as a way of combining learning with adventure: once classes are over, it is time for sport, games and excursions. For many families this is their first contact with a Swiss school, and it makes sense. A few weeks in summer ask far less of a family than a full school year, and the student goes home with an opinion of their own.

That is why I dislike seeing the camp run as a separate business, on another website, with a form that does not talk to admissions. Its pages are read by families who do not yet know the school, often with a younger child, or one leaving home for the first time. They need the same clarity about who looks after the children as the admissions pages, in the same languages. And they need a thread that leads, when the time is right, from the end of camp to the admissions interview.

The visit confirms.

A family that asks to visit has already found most of what they were looking for. They know who will look after their child, what their child will study, what it costs and when they need to decide. The visit confirms what the website has already told them. A boarding school that saves those answers for the visit is asking a family to travel a long way to learn what they could have read at home.

List the five questions asked most often during your visits. Then look for each one on your website, on your phone, the way a father in Hong Kong would at ten at night.

The ones you cannot find are the ones a family had to cross half the world to ask. And a doubt remains that no statistic resolves: how many families never came because they could not find the answers?

If you want to know which questions your school’s website leaves unanswered today, that is where the Strategic Diagnostic begins.