How to build a WhatsApp chatbot for a school (2026, free to start)
You need your fee schedule, your admissions steps and the school calendar, a WhatsApp number on a phone you control, and about ten minutes.
Building and testing the bot is free with a 30 message demo and no card; putting it on WhatsApp runs on the Starter plan at US$29 a month, which opens with a 7 day trial.
September 2026
What this bot does for a school
Five jobs it takes off your team, with the kind of exchange you will actually see in the transcript.
Answers admissions questions the moment a parent has them
Deadlines, required documents, entrance assessments, waiting lists. Parents research at night, and a school that answers at 10pm is on the shortlist the next morning.
Customerwhen does enrolment for next year close?
BotApplications for the next school year close on 15 November, and places are confirmed in December. You need the birth certificate, the last two school reports and a copy of both parents' ID. Late applications go on a waiting list.
Explains fees without a phone call
The question every family asks first and many are uncomfortable asking a person. It answers from your published schedule, including what the fee does and does not cover.
Customerhow much is year 5 per month
BotYear 5 is 340 a month over ten months, plus a one-off enrolment fee of 450 in the first year. That covers tuition, materials and insurance. Lunch is 110 a month and the bus is 85, both optional.
Keeps current families out of the office
Term dates, holidays, uniform, exam weeks, what happens on a rainy sports day. The traffic that fills your reception desk every September, answered from the calendar you already publish.
Customeris monday a holiday
BotYes, Monday 12 October is a public holiday and the school is closed, buses included. Classes resume Tuesday on the normal timetable. The next long break is 1 to 5 December.
Answers transport and timetable questions
Bus routes, pick-up points, drop-off times, after-school hours. Small logistics, asked constantly, and the answers rarely change once you have written them down.
Customerwhat time does the bus pass through San Miguel
BotRoute 3 picks up at San Miguel at 7:05am and drops off there at 4:20pm. The bus is 85 a month for one way and 140 for both. You register a route with the office at the start of each term.
Books tours and open days
It takes the family's name, the child's year group and two possible times, then hands the thread to admissions. Your team calls a family that has already read the fees.
Customerwed like to visit the school before deciding
BotOf course. Tours run Tuesdays and Thursdays at 9:30am during term. Can I take your name, a number, and the year group your child would enter? Admissions will confirm a date with you.
Build it in eight steps
Steps one to five are free and take about ten minutes. Step six is where WhatsApp, and the plan, come in.
Create the account
Open chatbotgen.com and sign up with an email address or a Google account. No card is asked for here, and none is needed for anything in steps one to five.
You should see: The onboarding wizard, open on the template picker.
Pick the Education Advisor template
Choose Education Advisor. It loads a starting prompt, three suggested questions and a widget colour written for this kind of business, so you are editing a draft instead of facing an empty box. Every line of it is yours to change.
You should see: A new chatbot in your dashboard with the prompt already filled in.
Train it on material you already have
Open Knowledge and paste your website address; the crawler reads your public pages and turns them into the bot's memory. Then upload the documents you hand people anyway: the fee schedule, the admissions brochure, the school calendar, and the uniform and transport information.
You should see: Each source moves from processing to trained. A twenty page site is usually done in two or three minutes.
Write down the answers your website never did
Still in Knowledge, open Q&A and add the questions your staff answers on the phone all day. For a school that is usually: what the enrolment fee covers, which documents an admission needs, when the term starts, and how the bus route works. Two sentences per answer is enough; the model writes the rest in its own words.
You should see: Each pair listed as its own source, trained within seconds.
Test it before anyone else does
Use the preview chat on the chatbot page and ask what a real customer asks. Start with "What are the fees for year 5 and when does enrolment close?" Then ask the same thing badly, with a typo and no punctuation, because that is how it will arrive.
You should see: A correct answer with the source it came from. Wrong or vague? Fix the source, not the prompt. Your free demo covers 30 messages, which is enough for this.
Connect WhatsApp by scanning a QR code
Connect your existing WhatsApp number in about a minute by scanning a QR, with no Meta Business verification. Open the chatbot's WhatsApp tab, press Connect, and a QR code appears. On the phone that owns the number, open WhatsApp, go to Settings, Linked devices, Link a device, and scan it. No Meta Business account, no verification form, no approval queue. This step runs on the Starter plan, US$29 a month, opening with a 7 day trial.
You should see: The status flips to Connected within a few seconds, and the next customer message is answered on your own number. Keep that phone charged and online, exactly as it already sits on your counter.
Decide when a person takes over
The admissions office should take over as soon as a family asks about a specific child, a place, or anything to do with an existing student. You do not need a dashboard for this. If you answer a customer yourself from the linked phone, the bot records your message, steps back from that conversation for 30 minutes, and each further reply of yours pushes the pause forward. It resumes quietly, without announcing itself.
You should see: Your own replies appearing in the conversation history in the dashboard.
Go live, then read the first fifty conversations
Put the number on your website, your Google Business profile and your Instagram bio. Then read the transcripts. Every question the bot did not have an answer for yet is one Q&A pair away from being answered forever, and the first week is where the whole quality of the thing gets decided.
You should see: A Conversations tab filling up, and a growing share of messages answered end to end without you.
What to feed it
A bot is only as good as the material behind it. These are the sources that answer the most messages for a school, in the order worth doing them.
The fee schedule
Per year group, with the enrolment fee, what is included, and the optional extras priced separately. Add the payment plan if you offer one.
The admissions process
Every step with its deadline: application, documents, assessment, interview, offer, deposit. Parents are trying to work out what happens next.
The school calendar
Terms, holidays, exam weeks, half days, public holidays. Upload it again each year, and delete the old one.
Transport and lunch
Routes, stops, times, prices, how to register, and the menu if you publish one.
The uniform list
What is required per year, where to buy it, and what the PE kit is.
Your curriculum and results
Languages taught, exam boards, university destinations. Prospective families compare on this and it is the hardest thing to find on most school websites.
Set it up so customers trust it
Three settings that separate a bot people keep writing to from one they stop trusting. Each is a line in the prompt, and each one is a minute of work.
Route these to your team
- Route anything about an individual student to a teacher or the office: grades, attendance, behaviour, a place offer.
- Let admissions confirm a place. The bot explains the process and collects the application, so your office picks up a family that already knows the fees and the deadlines.
- Keep fee payments and deposits in your own system.
- Route any safeguarding or wellbeing message to a named person immediately.
It answers in your customer's language
It replies in the language a family writes in, across the thirteen the model handles well. For a school with international families, that means the admissions conversation starts in the parent's own language without the office having to find someone who speaks it.
Hand the conversation to a person when
- Anything about an individual student, including grades, absence and behaviour.
- Any safeguarding or wellbeing concern, immediately and to a named person.
- A family ready to apply, so admissions can take them through it personally.
What people ask before they build one
Is it appropriate to have a bot talk to parents?
For logistics, yes, and parents prefer it: term dates and bus times at 9pm beat a callback on Thursday. For anything about their child, it should not even try. Write that boundary into the prompt and the bot will hand the conversation over instead of answering.
Do I need a Meta Business account or the official WhatsApp API?
No. You connect by scanning a QR code from the phone that owns the number, the same way WhatsApp Web does. There is no Meta Business verification, no approval queue and no per-message fee.
Can it handle the September flood of questions?
That is the week it earns its keep. It answers every parent at once, and the questions in September are precisely the repeatable ones: uniform, calendar, buses, lunch. The office is left with the ones that need judgement.
What does it cost to run?
Building and training the chatbot is free, with a 30 message demo to test it and no card. Connecting WhatsApp is on the Starter plan: US$29 a month for 3 chatbots and 2,000 messages, opening with a 7 day trial that does ask for a card. Prices are flat, not per message.
What about student data and privacy?
Train it only on published material: the fee schedule, the calendar, the brochure. Never upload student records, class lists or anything with a child's name in it. The bot answers from what you gave it, which is what keeps the whole thing simple and safe.
What happens when I answer a customer myself?
The bot gets out of the way. Your reply, typed on the linked phone, is recorded in the conversation and the assistant stops answering that thread for 30 minutes; every further message from you pushes the pause forward. It starts answering again quietly once the conversation has gone cold, so it can never talk over you mid-sentence.
Build it now, decide later
The Education Advisor template, your own material and ten minutes. Nothing to install and no card for the free build.