Every admissions call, absence message and parent question reaches the right desk.
Dialerportal gives independent and private schools a Cloud PBX that opens with your own departments, admissions, bursary, pastoral care and the absence line, holds prospective parents in a queue on open mornings instead of a busy tone, and turns anything missed into an email the office can actually work through.
Built for the way a school office actually gets called
Prospective parents, fee queries, a wave of sick notes at 8am and a pastoral call that cannot wait all arrive on the same switchboard. These are the tools that keep them apart.
A switchboard that names your departments
Queues that survive an open morning
An absence line that empties into an inbox
Call handling your safeguarding lead can stand behind
Text parents when the day changes
Numbers for the families you recruit from
Inquiries that do not fall out of the pipeline
Live before your next open morning
Keep the number printed in your prospectus, mirror your departments in the menu, and start taking parent calls the same day.
Port the number in the prospectus
Number porting brings your existing switchboard number across, so the prospectus, the gate sign, the parent handbook and your Google listing all stay accurate. Add DIDs for a dedicated absence or admissions line and a toll-free number for overseas families.
Mirror your departments in the menu
Build the IVR options around admissions, bursary, pastoral, absence and the main office, then set ring groups so each option reaches the people who genuinely handle that question.
Set the term calendar and out-of-hours cover
Business-hours routing follows the school day, half-terms, exam periods and holidays, sending evening calls to the duty houseparent and closed-day calls to an accurate message or voicemail-to-email.
Review after the first open day
Call analytics show when parents call, which departments carry the volume and where calls were abandoned, so you can staff the next admissions push properly. Recordings give the office something real to train new front-desk staff on.
An AI voice agent for the calls the school office never gets to
The front desk goes quiet at four, but parents shortlist schools in the evening and report absence before registration. The AI voice agent answers in natural conversation when the office is closed, already at capacity or halfway through an open morning, deals with the routine question, and hands anything sensitive to a person.
The prospective parent who calls at nine at night
Families research schools after their own working day, and a voicemail greeting is where a lot of that interest quietly ends. The agent talks them through which year groups have places at the current entry points, when the next open morning and entrance assessment fall, and what registration involves. It captures the child's current school, intended year of entry and whether the family is looking at day or boarding, so the registrar starts Monday with a real inquiry instead of a missed-call log.
Open morning and private tour slots, booked on the call
The agent puts a family on a named open morning or a private tour there and then, and takes the reschedule when a fixture, a work trip or a sibling's exam moves the date. It can ask how many adults and children are coming so the registrar knows what the morning will actually look like. Confirmations and reminders go out by text from the same number the school publishes.
The absence rush before registration
Attendance calls land in one narrow window before the register closes, and only so many of them get through while the office is also fielding admissions. The agent takes the pupil's name, form or tutor group, the reason and the expected return date, then logs the message so attendance can clear the whole batch against the register in one pass. Parents calling the night before get the same conversation rather than a beep.
It knows which calls belong to a human
The agent handles factual questions about term dates, the school day, uniform, bus routes and where the fee schedule lives, and it does not give advice on bursary awards, admissions decisions, tax or a family's financial circumstances. Anything raising a safeguarding or welfare concern, a distressed pupil or boarder, or an urgent matter during the school day goes to a person immediately, with a warm transfer to the duty staff member when someone is on cover. Every call and its outcome is written back to the family record in your CRM like any other call.
The tools behind your private schools phone system
Private Schools run on the same Dialerportal platform that powers cloud PBX, VoIP and call centers for businesses worldwide.
Phone systems for other industries
School phone system, your questions
What heads, bursars and admissions registrars ask before moving the school switchboard to the cloud.
It is a Cloud PBX for independent and private schools. One published number greets callers and sends them to admissions, the bursary, pastoral care or the absence line without the office relaying every message by hand. Queues absorb open-day and term-start volume, anything missed arrives as an email with a recording, and staff answer from a browser or mobile softphone on a school number. Seats start at $19 per seat per month with no contract.
Open mornings, offer days and the first week of term put more calls through the office in an afternoon than a quiet half-term sees in a fortnight. Call queues hold parents in order and pass them to the next free member of the office team, with a position announcement so nobody hangs up guessing. Because billing is month to month, you can add seats for the admissions season and drop them once things settle.
Yes. Give absences their own DID, publish it in the parent handbook and route it straight to voicemail-to-email, so every message lands in the attendance inbox with the caller's number and a recording attached. The office works through the 8am backlog in one sitting and matches names to the register, instead of writing sick notes on sticky pads between admissions calls. Business-hours routing can send the same line to a live person once registration closes.
Recording is configured per line, so you can record admissions and main office numbers while leaving a pastoral or counseling extension out of it. Because parents and pupils reach staff on school-owned numbers rather than personal cell phones, conversations sit inside the school's own system with a timestamp and a caller number a designated safeguarding lead can retrieve. Your school policy still governs what is recorded, how long it is retained and who may hear it.
Each teacher, houseparent, registrar or department head gets an extension they use from a browser or a mobile softphone, so a boarding duty call or a callback to a parent shows the school number instead of a personal cell. Routing sends a department's calls to that person only during their cover window and pushes everything else to the office or voicemail-to-email, so staff are reachable in the evening without being on call all night.
Cloud PBX seats start at $19 per seat per month, month to month, with no contract. Setup runs in hours rather than weeks because there is no hardware to install: you build the department menu, set your term-calendar hours and add staff from a browser, and number porting keeps the number already printed in your prospectus. If you get stuck, US-based support answers in about 30 seconds, or call 1-888-488-8138.
It answers the calls the office cannot: evenings, weekends, holidays and the moments when every line is busy on an open morning. In conversation it answers admissions and term-date questions, books or moves an open-morning slot, takes an absence report with the pupil's form group and expected return, and passes anything pastoral, safeguarding or urgent to a person. It works alongside the PBX, which still routes the calls staff pick up, and logs each call and its outcome to your CRM.
Stop losing applicants to an unanswered switchboard
See how your office handles open day and the first week of term with department routing, queues and SMS, or talk to a human at 1-888-488-8138.