A lot of Muslim weekend schools, Arabic schools, and community education providers run on Facebook. They post term dates there, announcements there, photos from events there. Parents are told to check the page for updates. New families are pointed toward it when they ask about enrollment.

This works, up to a point. Then it stops working, usually gradually and without a single obvious moment when it fails.

The problems with Facebook as your main online presence

You do not own it. The platform can change its algorithm tomorrow and your posts will reach half the people they reached last week. It can change its policies and restrict certain types of educational or religious content. It can, in theory, remove your page entirely. You have no control over any of this.

Parents who are not on Facebook, or who are not connected to your page, cannot find your term dates. When a new family hears about your school through word of mouth and searches online, they are not searching Facebook. They are searching Google. If you are not on Google, you do not exist for that family.

Information gets buried. A post from eight months ago with your fees, a post from six months ago with your session times, a post from last month with your term dates. A parent joining mid-year has to scroll through your entire history to piece together the information they need. A proper website has a page for each of these things, always up to date, always findable in thirty seconds.

What Google-findable looks like

When a parent searches "Arabic school East London" or "Islamic studies Saturday school Walthamstow", they are looking for a website. Google's results are websites. A Facebook page ranks poorly for these searches and often does not appear at all.

A simple five-page website with your school's name, location, programmes, fees, and an enrollment contact form will appear in local search results. A parent who had never heard of you can find you. That is not possible through Facebook alone.

Faith-specific considerations for the website

If your school has a faith identity, say so directly and early. Do not hedge it. A parent looking for an Islamic school for their child wants to see that the school is unapologetically Islamic. A parent looking for an Arabic school for heritage language reasons wants to see the curriculum addressed in those terms.

Imagery choices matter. If your school would prefer not to use photos of children, or has preferences around gender representation in visuals, a well-built website can be designed around these considerations from the start. This is something a generic web builder template will not handle sensitively. It is something worth raising explicitly when you brief a web designer.

Bilingual content is a real option. If your community speaks Arabic, Urdu, Somali, or another language alongside English, a website that acknowledges this in its copy or offers a translated summary signals something meaningful to parents in that community.

The practical case

A website costs money to build. A Facebook page is free. That is the calculation most school administrators make, and it is reasonable given constrained budgets.

But the cost of not being findable on Google is paid in missed enrollments. Parents who searched, found nothing, and enrolled their child somewhere else. You do not see this cost itemised anywhere. You just see that your classes are not as full as they could be.

A basic five-page website for a supplementary school, built properly, can be done for £1,200 and maintained for £60 a month. For a school with even ten students paying term fees, that cost pays for itself quickly if the site brings in one family that would not have found you otherwise.

The right approach

Keep the Facebook page. Use it for the community functions it is actually good at: event photos, parent announcements, community discussion. But give it a website to point to. A place where the information lives permanently, where new families can find you through search, and where the enrollment process happens in a structured way.

The two work well together. One without the other is a gap.

For data on internet search behaviour and how communities find local services, Ofcom's Communications Market Report provides useful context on how UK adults use search.