Clare House School

Clare House School was preparing to open in September 2026, in a building a previous school left behind. A community-led trust, a 106-year lease, an executive head with thirty-three years in independent education, and families who had already committed.

The brief was the website. The finding was that the school did not own its own search results.

A parent searching for Clare House found the school, and alongside it the predecessor’s Google listing marked permanently closed, news coverage of that closure, a social account still carrying the old branding, and a prospectus hosted on a third-party platform that collected the search value instead of the school. There was no Business Profile for Clare House at all. The website was the least broken thing about it.

The brand was already good. Teal, gold, the horse logo, clean typography. That was an asset and it was left alone.

What was missing sat underneath: page titles and descriptions thin or absent, no schema identifying the site as a school, inner pages carrying a few paragraphs and a registration form, and one call to action for a parent who was not yet ready to commit to one.

The structure was rebuilt around how a family actually decides. Arrive, understand what the school is and why it exists, find the part relevant to a three-year-old or a nine-year-old, and be given a next step that is not an application form. The prospectus was brought onto the school’s own site. The search presence was claimed, corrected and made consistent across listings. The head’s name and thirty-three years were put where a parent looking for reassurance would find them, because in a school opening from a closure, the most powerful trust signal available is a person.

The school was opening in September and the building was still being finished. There was almost no photography, and every image on the site at launch stood in for one that did not exist yet. All of them would need replacing in the weeks after the doors opened, which is exactly when a school has least time for a developer.

So the photography was built as something the school’s own marketing lead changes, not as something the design holds in place. No ticket, no invoice, no waiting.