Your website already contains the curriculum, fees, facilities, admissions process, staff lists, policies and probably several hundred photographs of pupils doing interesting things.

So what exactly is the prospectus for? If the answer is “because schools have prospectuses”, we should probably stop there. A good prospectus needs a job. It might introduce the school to a family who knows very little about it. It might be handed over after an open day. It might arrive in the post while parents are comparing three schools around the kitchen table.

Those are different moments, and the content should reflect the role the prospectus plays within the admissions journey. What print can do particularly well is sequence. Websites are brilliant at information, but they allow people to jump around. A prospectus can control pace. It can build an argument. It can take someone from one idea to another and create a coherent impression of the school.

That makes it particularly useful for storytelling. The difficulty is that many prospectuses are organised exactly like the school itself: welcome, academic, pastoral, sport, music, drama, boarding, Sixth Form. Perfectly logical. Also rather predictable.

A stronger prospectus has an idea running through it. Individual sections still exist, but they contribute to something larger: a picture of what the school believes, what pupils experience and what that experience enables them to become.

Evidence matters too. If the school talks about independence, show pupils exercising it. If pastoral care is central, explain how it works rather than simply calling it outstanding. If breadth matters, demonstrate the connections between different opportunities rather than producing a heroic list of clubs.

Specificity creates credibility.

Then there is the inevitable print-versus-digital question. Both can work. Print offers physical presence and can create a sense of occasion. Digital offers accessibility, flexibility and richer media. The mistake is assuming one format should simply imitate the other.

A digital prospectus does not need a page-turn animation to prove it is digital. A printed prospectus does not need to contain every piece of information simply because there is space.

Give each format a reason to exist. And before commissioning photography, choosing paper or debating whether the cover should be matt or uncoated, decide what the reader should understand and feel by the final page. That is prospectus strategy. Everything else is execution.