Why your admission enquiries are flat, and what actually moves them

Most schools start marketing when admissions open. By then the shortlist has already formed. Here is what the Delhi calendar actually tells you to do, and when.

The calendar is published. Almost nobody works backwards from it.

Delhi is unusual in that the whole private school admission process is dated in public by the Directorate of Education. That makes it a useful worked example even if your school is elsewhere, because it removes the guesswork about when decisions happen.

Here are the last two cycles as they were actually published.

Swipe to see the full table

Stage	2025-26 session	2026-27 session
Registration opens	28 November 2024	4 December 2025
Registration closes	20 December 2024	27 December 2025
First merit list	17 January 2025	23 January 2026
Second list	3 February 2025	9 February 2026
Process closes	14 March 2025	19 March 2026

Two years, the same shape. Registration opens in the last week of November or the first week of December. The first list lands in the third or fourth week of January. It is over by the middle of March.

Now work backwards from the only date that matters, which is the day a parent submits a form. Somebody filling in a registration on 6 December did not decide on 6 December. They started looking in September, asked other parents through October, narrowed to three or four schools in November, and spent the registration window doing paperwork for a decision that was already made.

Everything a school publishes in January is arriving after the decision it was meant to influence.

Which means the expensive months are the wrong months. November and December are when every school in the city advertises at once, costs peak and every message sounds identical. August to October is when almost nobody is competing for a parent's attention and when the research is actually happening.

What parents are doing while you are not looking

A parent comparing schools is running a small research project, and most of it happens somewhere you cannot see. A search. Your website. A WhatsApp group of parents from the neighbourhood. A conversation with somebody whose child already goes there. A review page. Increasingly, a question typed into an AI assistant.

What they are trying to settle is narrower and more practical than most school marketing assumes.

• What will this actually cost, in total. Not the tuition line. Tuition plus transport plus uniform plus the annual charges plus how much it goes up each year. This is the most searched question in the category and the one schools answer least clearly.
• Which board, and what does that mean for my child at 16. Not the acronym. The consequence.
• Who teaches here, and do they stay. Staff turnover gets read as a proxy for everything else about how a school is run.
• How far is it, and how does my child get there. Distance and transport quietly eliminate more schools than any other single factor, and no amount of marketing fixes it.
• Is my child safe and cared for here. Rarely asked out loud. Always being assessed.
• What is this place actually like. Not the facilities list. The atmosphere.

A school that answers those plainly gets onto the shortlist. A school that publishes event photographs and a list of facilities does not, however good it is. This is why the phrase "we need more content" is usually the wrong diagnosis. Most schools with flat enquiry numbers are not short of content. They are short of answers.

Publish the fees

This is the recommendation that gets the most resistance, so it is worth arguing properly.

The usual objection is that publishing fees scares parents away, or invites competitors to undercut you. In practice, withholding the number does not delay the decision. It moves it. The parent asks in a WhatsApp group instead, gets a figure from somebody whose child joined three years ago, and either writes you off over a number that is wrong or calls you expecting a number you cannot honour.

Schools that publish a clear fee structure usually get fewer enquiries and noticeably better ones, because everybody who calls has already accepted the number. If your admissions team is spending its days explaining fees on the phone, that is not a sales process. That is a missing web page.

The criteria page is a marketing asset, not a compliance chore

Under the Delhi process, schools have to display their admission criteria and points before registration opens. For the 2025-26 cycle that deadline was 13 December 2024, a fortnight into the registration window.

Most schools treat this as paperwork and upload a PDF. But think about who reads that page and when. It is a parent, in the exact week they are deciding, actively looking for the thing your school is publishing. There is no colder audience problem to solve and no targeting to buy. They have come to you.

A criteria page written as a web page rather than a scanned document, explaining what the points mean, who tends to qualify, and what a parent should do next, is one of the highest-value pages a school can have. It is also one of the only pages where being clearer than the school down the road is straightforwardly worth money.

The four things that move the number

1. A position a parent would repeat

Every school claims holistic development, individual attention and world-class facilities. None of those sentences survive being repeated to a friend. The work is finding the thing that is genuinely truer of your school than of the three others on the shortlist, and saying it in one sentence a parent could pass on accurately. This is uncomfortable because it usually means giving up a claim you like in order to make one that is specific.

2. An admissions page rebuilt around the real questions

In the order parents ask them, with fees included, on one page, readable on a phone. Most schools have a page here that lists dates and a form. It is usually the single highest-return thing to fix, because every other channel sends people to it.

3. Content made during the session, published before the cycle

You cannot film a classroom in November when the point was to show what November looks like. The best proof for next year's admissions is made in the middle of this year, while there is something to film. Most schools remember this at exactly the moment it is too late, and end up publishing stock photographs and a prospectus.

4. Being findable, including by assistants

Parents search for schools by area, by board and by fee range. Increasingly they also ask an AI assistant which schools to consider, and get back a short list assembled from whatever the web says about you. If your website does not state plainly what you are, where you are and what you charge, you will not be in that list. This is less exotic than it sounds. It is mostly the same clarity that helps the parent.

What we would not do

Three things, so this reads as advice rather than a pitch.

We would not run a lead generation campaign into an admissions page that does not answer the questions. That converts a budget into a list of parents who were never going to enrol, and it makes the campaign look like the problem when the page was.

We would not promise a number of admissions. Intake depends on fees, location, board, capacity, reputation and the competition down the road, and marketing controls almost none of that.

And if the honest read is that enquiries are flat because the fee is out of range for the catchment, or the transport does not reach where families live, we would say so rather than sell a year of content around it. Marketing cannot fix a distance problem.

If you are reading this in September

You are in the right month and you have roughly eight weeks before it stops being cheap.

In priority order: fix the admissions page and put the fees on it. Write down the one thing your school is actually better at and check whether it appears anywhere on your website. Look at what you have filmed this term, because that is next year's proof. Then, when registration opens and everyone else starts shouting, you will be the school parents already have on the list.

Common questions

When should a school start marketing for the next admissions cycle?

Between August and October, before registration opens. In Delhi the Directorate of Education opened registrations on 28 November for the 2025-26 session and on 4 December for 2026-27, and both years the first merit list followed in mid to late January. A parent filling a form in early December chose that school weeks earlier. Marketing that starts in January is arriving after the decision it was meant to influence.

Why are admission enquiries low even though the school posts every day?

Because posting and being researched are different activities. A parent comparing three schools is looking for total fees, the board and what it means later, whether teachers stay, distance and transport, and what the place actually feels like. A feed of event photographs answers none of those. Most schools with weak enquiry numbers do not have a content problem, they have an answers problem.

What is the single most useful page on a school website?

The admissions page, and it is usually the page that has had the least thought put into it. It should answer the real questions in the order parents ask them, with fees included. Rebuilding that one page tends to do more for enquiry volume than an entire campaign, because it is where everything else sends people.

Should a school publish its fees online?

Yes. Fees are the most searched question in the category and withholding them does not delay the decision, it just moves it to a WhatsApp group where the number will be wrong. Schools that publish a clear fee structure get fewer enquiries and better ones, because the people who call have already accepted the number.

Can marketing guarantee more admissions?

No. Intake depends on fees, location, board, capacity, reputation and the school down the road, and marketing controls almost none of that. What it can do is make sure a school is found and understood by the parents who are already looking, and that the ones who enquire are the right fit. Anyone quoting a guaranteed admissions number is guessing.

Where these dates came from

The 2025-26 schedule is as reported by Careers360 when the Directorate of Education issued it, and the 2026-27 schedule as reported by the same publication in December 2025. Both cover open seats at private unaided schools for nursery, KG and Class 1 in Delhi. The schedule for the next session had not been published when this was written. Other cities, boards and school types run on different dates, and this article makes no claim about them beyond the shape of the cycle. Everything else here is our own reading, based on the admissions work we have done, and is offered as argument rather than as data.