The Rule That Comes Before Everything Else
A prospective student may be fifteen. Safeguarding is not a tone of voice you ask a model to adopt, and it is not a category in a report — it is a stop condition on the running conversation that reaches a trained person. Which is why this section comes before the one about conversion rather than after it.
The last field is the only one that counts. A signal that was seen and then talked past is worse than one that was never seen at all.
- Age firstBefore anything else is asked, and as a field rather than an assumption
- Topic boundaryWhat may be discussed is a list — everything else is a stop
- Calling hoursSeparate, narrower hours for under-eighteens, enforced on the job
- RoutingTo a trained person, not to the next free line
A Year That Is Mostly Two Weeks
Nothing happens for five months, then everything happens. The phone system fails in precisely the ten days a cohort is decided — and the applicant who could not get through to you gets through to somebody else.
Illustrative. No staffing plan bridges that jump, and nobody recruits for ten days.
Two Weeks of Capacity, Then Back Down
Results day turns a quiet inbox into thousands of calls from people deciding where to spend three years. Concurrency is a ceiling you raise for a fortnight and lower again, rather than a team you cannot hire for a fortnight.
And Then the Paperwork
Between an offer and an enrolment sits a list with gaps: a reference, a transcript, a language certificate, a funding confirmation. The chase is thousands of short, identical calls — and it decides how many offers actually become enrolments.
Dashed means: still outstanding
Chased until the file is complete
The workflow knows exactly which document is missing, explains it once clearly, and switches to a message with an upload link after two attempts — until the file is complete rather than until somebody forgets.
And the offer holder who went quiet
Somebody who stops replying in July is not a lost cause, they are an uncalled number. A call before the deadline asks what is actually in the way — accommodation, funding, a competing offer — and the answer is typed.
Groupable enumerations rather than free text: next year's planning starts from counts instead of impressions.
Describe your programmes, the routes in and what disqualifies somebody, and the AI assistance drafts the agent, the safeguarding rule against a field that exists, the qualification schema, the chase workflows and the multilingual copy — as a reviewable list of individual edits. The one rule that has to be right before the first call is the safeguarding exit; that is exactly why it is proposed rather than quietly set.
Where minors are involved, separate requirements apply to consent, data processing, contact hours and safeguarding, and in many cases parental consent is required. An AI agent may support this work but must never take, assess or delay a safeguarding report. Configuring the routing to trained staff, and complying with the applicable rules, rest with the operator.
The calendar behind open days and advice appointments is under Appointment Booking, the calling machinery — ceilings, windows, retries — under Outbound, and the chase workflows under Automations.
- First
- The safeguarding exit
- 2 weeks
- Instead of a year-round team
- Every
- Missing document chased
- 0
- Days of wait abroad
A stop condition on the call, not a category in a report
Capacity is raised for the peak and lowered again
Called twice, then sent a link, until the file is complete
An answer in their own language, whatever your office hours