Admissions¶
Who does this: Admissions Officer Where: Admissions → Applications How often: Daily during the intake season
Admissions is a pipeline. An enquiry arrives, the school reviews it, interviews the family, decides, quotes the fees, and — only at the end — turns the applicant into a student.
Why an applicant is not a student¶
Most applications never become students. If the system created a student file at enquiry, the register would fill up with children who never attended, and the school would be keeping records on families who were turned down.
So an application holds its own copy of the child's name, gender, date of birth and nationality. The student file is created at the moment of enrolment, not before. An application that was never accepted never produces one — which is also what makes the admissions funnel countable.
The one thing that is not duplicated is documents. A birth certificate uploaded with the application is the same piece of paper the day after enrolment, so it is carried across rather than asked for twice.
The board¶
The default view is a pipeline board, one column per stage. Applications are cards. The admissions officer works left to right.
Applied → Under Review → Interview Scheduled → Interview Completed → Accepted
↓ ↓
Waitlisted Fee Quotation
↓
Enrolled
Rejected · Cancelled — reachable from any stage before enrolment
Process — one application end to end¶
1. Record the application¶
Admissions → Applications → New.
| Fill in | Notes |
|---|---|
| Child's details | Name, gender, date of birth, nationality |
| Grade applied for | With the intake year |
| Guardian contact | Who the school corresponds with |
| Source | How the family heard of the school |
| Previous schools | One entry per school, with curriculum, dates, reason for leaving and transfer-certificate status. A family that has moved countries will have more than one. |
The application is numbered automatically — APP/2026/00001 — with the counter
starting again each calendar year, because an application is quoted in one
season's correspondence.
2. Start Review¶
Press Start Review. This is the office saying the application is being worked on rather than sitting in the inbox.
3. Schedule the interview¶
Interview slots are published windows with a capacity, not one-per-family appointments — a school interviewing an intake runs a morning of ten-minute conversations.
- Set up the windows first: Admissions → Interview Slots → New, with the date, time, interviewer, capacity and, if the morning is for one year group, the grades it is for.
- On the application, choose a slot and press Schedule Interview.
The interview appears in the interviewer's calendar automatically.
The system refuses to book a slot that is full, that is not open for booking, or that is reserved for other grades. It also refuses to create two overlapping slots for the same interviewer — a parent turned away at the door is not a mistake that can be corrected afterwards. Two slots that touch (one ends at nine, the next starts at nine) are fine.
4. Record the outcome¶
After the interview, record the result on the application and press Interview Done. The system will not let the stage move on while the result is still blank.
5. Decide¶
| Button | What it means |
|---|---|
| Accept | The child has a place. Checks a seat is actually available in the grade. |
| Waitlist | No place today. The date of waitlisting is stamped, and it is the queue position. |
| Reject | The school is not offering a place. |
| Cancel | The family withdrew, or the application is being abandoned. Available at any stage before enrolment. |
6. Quote the fees (optional)¶
Send Fee Quotation produces a priced quotation for the year, from the published fee structure for that grade, and moves the application to Fee Quotation. It is what a family asks for before committing. See Fees and collection.
7. Check the documents¶
Refresh Checklist builds or rebuilds the list of documents this particular applicant has to produce, from the school's rule table — their nationality, their grade, their gender, and where they came from.
Upload and verify against those rows as the family brings papers in. A requirement marked as blocking will stop the enrolment in the next step until it is verified. See Document checklists.
Note
Transport-conditional documents deliberately do not appear on an application. An application does not say whether the child will take the bus, and the system will not guess. Those rows appear on the student's checklist after enrolment, once the question has an answer.
8. Enroll the student¶
Enroll Student does four things in one action:
- Checks the blocking documents are verified.
- Creates the permanent student file, with a permanent admission number.
- Carries the uploaded documents across to it, rather than copying them — one piece of paper, one verification stamp.
- Creates the enrollment for the intake year, and leaves it in Draft.
The enrollment is left in draft on purpose. The child has a place; which section they will sit in is the registrar's next decision and is often days away. Confirming it here would make the software guess.
From this point the child is a student and the Enrollment process takes over.
The waitlist looks after itself¶
When a seat comes free, the system offers it to the longest-waiting application for that year and grade, and accepts it.
It does this at two moments:
- Immediately, when a seat is released in the admissions office — a rejection or a cancellation.
- Overnight, as a sweep, because a seat can also be released somewhere the pipeline cannot see: an enrollment withdrawn by the registrar, a family that never turned up.
A family left on a waitlist beside an empty chair is the exact failure this prevents. The overnight job runs once a day and needs nobody to press anything.
Reopening a decision¶
Reset to Applied puts an application back to the start of the pipeline. It is refused once the application has been converted into a student — at that point the child is enrolled, and the enrolment is what has to be reversed, not the application.
Admission sources¶
Admissions → Configuration → Admission Sources ships empty. The school fills in the channels it actually uses, and the funnel then reports on real ones rather than invented ones.