There are about 14.71 lakh schools in India, and 24.69 crore students in them. Those are the Ministry of Education’s own numbers, from its UDISE+ 2024-25 report. Narrow it down to one city and you can still be left with fifteen or twenty names, which is more Saturdays of campus visits than most of us have. So the first round of sorting happens on the school’s website.
Most parents start there. When the school review site Niche surveyed US parents in 2025, 75% said they had researched a school on its own website, ahead of Google searches (70%) and asking friends and neighbours (61%).
The trouble is that these websites are usually better at describing a school than at helping you choose one. Content RevOps reviewed close to 2,000 websites of education companies and private education providers for its State of Content Marketing in Education 2026 study. About 42% of what they published was written to get noticed, and only about 18% was written for someone close to a decision. A parent gets plenty of campus photographs and very little to compare. These are the things worth looking for, and the questions to ask when they’re missing.
Can you find the fees?
Fewer than 1 in 4 websites in the study showed any pricing. For school fees that gap gets more expensive every year. When the government ran its education survey in 2025, families with a child in a non-government school were spending ₹25,002 a year on average. In government schools the figure was ₹2,863. It isn’t getting cheaper either. LocalCircles asked parents about this in April 2026, and 7 in 10 of those with children in private schools said their fees had risen 30% or more in three years.
What you want is a fee page that goes class by class and doesn’t stop at tuition. Admission fee, transport, meals, uniforms, exam fees, the lot. If tuition is the only figure you can find, ask the school to put the full annual cost in writing. I’d also ask what the increase was in each of the last three years.
Who will teach your child?
In the 2018-19 school year, the US National Center for Education Statistics asked parents who had considered more than one school what mattered to them. 79% rated the quality of teachers and staff as very important, and 71% said the same about safety.
Teachers are also one of the hardest things to find on a website. In the Content RevOps study, only 26% of sites gave bios with credentials for the people behind their content. CBSE has noticed the same thing. Every affiliated school has to publish a “Mandatory Public Disclosure” on its website, and in a circular from January 2026 the board complained that teachers’ names and qualifications were routinely missing from it.
If the school is CBSE affiliated, look for a link with that name. A complete disclosure lists every teacher with their qualifications, the fee structure, the last three years of board results, the building and fire safety certificates, and details of the school’s counsellor and special educator. For schools under other boards, you can ask for the same list.
Is there proof behind the claims?
“Excellent results” and “holistic development” appear on nearly every school website. Only about a third of the sites in the study backed claims like these with a case study, and 12% offered what the researchers counted as strong proof. For a school, proof would be board results by year for the whole cohort, where last year’s Class 12 went next, and how many students each teacher has. CBSE’s own limit is 30 students per teacher.
Be a little wary of a results page that shows only the toppers. A handful of names says very little about the rest of the year group.
What does it say about safety and your child’s data?
Schools now hold a lot of information about children, from home addresses to photographs to logins for learning apps. In the study, 82% of sites mentioned data protection or similar rules, but only about 1 in 60 explained them in any depth. I’d want a school to tell me plainly what it collects about my child and who gets to see it. The same page, or one near it, ought to cover the transport policy and how visitors are checked, and give the name of a person a child can go to when something is wrong. Some schools sum up their anti-bullying policy in one line. Ask for the whole document.
Does it answer what you’d ask on a visit?
Don’t expect the website to do the comparing for you. Roughly 1 in 20 sites in the study had any comparison content, and fewer than a third took on the objections people usually raise. The helpful ones do give you the basics, though: admission dates and steps, age criteria, a daily timetable, class sizes, and what happens when a child joins in the middle of the year.
Then there’s coaching. In that same government survey, 27% of students were taking private coaching, which is a cost no fee page will show you. So ask what happens at this school when a child falls behind, and whether most families end up paying for tuition on top.
And if the website won’t tell you?
Email the admissions office. Keep it to four or five specific questions and watch what comes back, and how long it takes. Most schools will answer a clear question from a parent. If the reply is a brochure and an invitation to “visit the campus to know more”, expect the same kind of answer once your child is enrolled.
About the author
Stefan Kalpachev is the founder of Content RevOps, which works with education companies on how they explain and prove what they do. He led its 2026 study of close to 2,000 education websites and previously worked on content for Pearson Online Learning and King’s College London.
