The admissions journey is the first act of the educational experience.
The admissions function sits at the commercial tip of the educational mission — the first thing a family encounters, yet the part of the organisation most likely to be under-designed. The way an enquiry is handled, how quickly it is acknowledged, whether the response feels attentive or perfunctory: these are not administrative details. They are the first signals of what the organisation is like to trust.
Which means a well-run admissions operation is not just a commercial asset. It is an expression of the organisation's values. Attentiveness is not volume. It is precision — responding to what a family actually needs, at the moment they need it, in a way that makes it easy to say yes this year and want to return in the years to come.
That is what we write about here — and what we build.
The Foundation Essays
The sector has been asking the wrong people to do the wrong jobs, and calling the result an admissions problem. These three essays make the case that it is a design problem — and that design problems have design solutions.
On hunters and gardeners, and the case for splitting your admissions team in two.
Admissions teams are asked to do two fundamentally different jobs — converting cold enquiries and keeping existing relationships warm — as if they require the same person. They don't. They don't even require the same temperament. This essay introduces the hunter and gardener framework, and makes the case that the organisations performing best aren't working harder. They're finally working as themselves.
Read the essay →On the education mission, and the case for selling it.
The operations director told me I was rude. A colleague told me she could no longer work somewhere that was only about the money. They weren't wrong to push back — but they were pushing back against a version of sales that this essay doesn't defend. This essay defends the other kind: attentive, student-centred, structurally sound. The kind that ends with a family who trusts you before their child has crossed the threshold. If you believe in your programme, letting a family go elsewhere isn't a neutral act of respect. It's a failure of confidence dressed up as one.
Read the essay →On fashionable solutions for stubborn problems, and the case for asking the harder question first.
When numbers disappoint, the instinct is to reach for a fix — a sales trainer, a new CRM, an automation layer. These are not bad tools. But they are being deployed before the structural question has been asked, by people who have a professional incentive never to ask it. This essay maps what a properly designed commercial operation actually looks like, why the fashionable fixes so often fail to stick, and where external expertise genuinely fits — and where it doesn't.
Coming June 2026 →If any of this resonates, the first conversation costs nothing.
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