Keeping your listing accurate

In our mission, to help parents make confident, informed choices, and to help schools learn and grow through constructive, well-intentioned feedback, it is absolutely critical that your listings are as accurate and complete as possible.

We hope our interests align in this objective, so please read on to learn how you can help us to keep your information up to date.

How we currently populate our listings

We use a combination of automated systems that "scrape" data from the internet, and good old fashioned human research.

Where we're heading

In the future we'll be developing our system so that schools can "claim" their listing and update their own data, but we're not there yet.

Until then, we rely on you to let us know if there is a problem.

Why it's not a trivial challenge

As we well know, the internet is a big place, and you can't trust everything you read.

We rank our research sources by "authority" to make sure we're only using trusted sources and minimising false information.

For example, when researching the scholarships and bursaries offered by a school, we will prefer to use the school's official website as a source. However, that school might say one thing on their admissions page and something subtly contradictory in their admissions policy document.

This is more common than you might think, and it's perfectly understandable—the legal/compliance team have made an update to the policy that hasn't been reflected on the admissions page yet. We might also consult the ISC website, which may say something else subtly contradictory.

And this is just scholarships and bursaries.

When trying to figure out whether a school has a swimming pool, for example, it becomes even more complex. The school website might talk about offering swimming lessons, but does this mean that they have a pool, or do they use an external facility? We try to use best judgment, but it's never going to be perfect.

How you can help

Tell us

You can always contact us to set the record straight.

Not only will we fix the listing, but we can also update the instructions for our automated systems to make sure it never makes that mistake again.

For example, if you contact us to let us know that you have an indoor swimming pool then we will add that to your listing and also add an explicit instruction to our research tool to state "this school has an indoor swimming pool". This instruction will be taken as fact and will override any contradictory information it finds.

Update your website

This is good advice in any case.

If it's not easy for us to determine which facilities you have, what your school values are, whether you have an officially adopted motto, etc.—then it's not going to be easy for any other user of your website to do the same.

For example, a surprising number of schools will talk about "instilling values", but fail to explicitly list those values.

Explicitly listing values, facilities and other useful information about your school will not only help us to keep your listing accurate, but it will also improve your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

You operate in a competitive environment, and helping Google to understand that you have an indoor swimming pool will help your website rank for "long tail" (more specific and less competitive) keywords like "Independent schools in kent with an indoor swimming pool".

As we move into the world of AI, this principle will help you here too. AI systems read the entire internet and produce answers to questions that have the highest probability of being correct and appropriate. The less ambiguity there is about your institution, they more likely an AI will correctly include you when a user asks "give me a list of all independent schools in kent with a swimming pool".

Update 3rd party listings

Wikipedia will always be considered high-authority by LLMs and search engines, but it is very often out of date.

A good example is your motto. Many schools have historically used a motto, but have rebranded and modernised in recent years and abandoned the traditional latin motto. However, Wikipedia may be behind the times. You can log into Wikipedia yourself and update this listing.

Likewise Muddy Stilettos, https://get-information-schools.service.gov.uk/, and other authoritative and highly trusted sites. Review these listings regularly, reach out to the admin, and get them updated.

Good for us, good for you

For anyone to show up to your open day, you need to be on their shortlist. The internet is where parents will do their research and create their shortlist, so it's essential that the internet carries complete and accurate information about your school.

Proudly list your facilities. Make your values clear. List all of the school associations that you're a member of.

It will help you appeal to parents with specific criteria and get you onto more open day shortlists.

It'll also help us keep our listings accurate!

Please contact us if you have any feedback or comments. We'd love to hear from you.