Online applications¶
Who does this: Parents and guardians, from the school website
Who watches it: Admissions Officer
Where: the website's Apply Now button, or /admissions/apply
How often: Continuously during the intake season
The school's prospectus describes seven steps from enquiry to first day. Step 2 is "the student's guardian completes and signs the application form". This is that step, done online.
What the family fills in is the application — the same record the admissions officer would have typed in, in the same pipeline board. Nothing is re-keyed.
What the family sees¶
1. Apply Now¶
The Apply Now button on the Admissions page leads to a short page that explains what happens next and offers two buttons: I already have an account and Create an account. A family applying for a second child already has one.
An account is not bureaucracy. It is what lets the family save the form, come back to it, upload documents as they arrive, and follow the application through afterwards.
2. The form, in five steps¶
| Step | What is asked |
|---|---|
| Applicant | The child's name in English and Arabic, gender, date of birth, nationality — and which grade and which intake year. Plus who is applying, and how the school can reach them. |
| Details | Identity numbers the family has: national ID or Iqama, passport, birth certificate, border number. How they heard about the school. Anything they want the school to know. |
| Schooling | Previous schools, most recent first, with curriculum and reason for leaving. A child joining their first school skips it. |
| Documents | The checklist the school's own rules produce for this child. Upload a PDF or a photograph, up to 10 MB each. |
| Review | Everything read back, a declaration to tick, and Submit. |
The form saves after each step. A family can close the browser at step three on Sunday and pick it up at step four on Tuesday — pressing Apply Now again takes them straight back to where they stopped, not to a second blank form.
Applying for a second child is the Apply for a place button on My Account → Admission Applications, which always starts a fresh one.
3. After submitting¶
The family gets an email carrying their application number, and can see the application at any time under My Account → Admission Applications: its status, its interview date once one is set, and which documents are still outstanding. They can keep uploading documents after submitting — most of a checklist arrives in the weeks after a family applies.
A family can withdraw their own application up to the point where a place is offered. After that it is a conversation with the admissions office.
What the school sees¶
Drafts are visible, and they are not applications¶
An application a family has started and not submitted sits in a Draft (Online) column at the left of the admissions board, its card marked Online: Documents — whichever step they stopped on — with an orange Online Draft ribbon on the form. It is not part of the funnel and none of the pipeline buttons apply to it.
It is worth looking at all the same. A draft that has sat at the documents step for a week is the most actionable row on the board: somebody wanted to apply and got stuck. The card and the form both say which step they stopped on, so the office knows what to ask before it telephones.
Numbering¶
A draft carries a provisional number — APP/DRAFT/00001 — and takes a real
admissions number the moment the family submits. This is deliberate: a family
who opens the form one evening and never comes back would otherwise leave a gap
in the middle of the register the school actually works from.
Finishing an application for a family¶
A family with no scanner, or no email address they check, reads the rest of the form out over the telephone. The officer opens the draft, fills in what is missing, and presses Submit for the Family. Without that button the office would have to retype the whole application beside the draft.
Setting it up¶
Opening and closing the intake¶
School → Academic Years → the year → Online Admissions → Open for Online Applications.
This is the switch. The form offers only the years it is set on, and a visitor arriving when nothing is open is told so and pointed at the admissions office.
This is not the same as the year being Active. The running year is Active and is usually closed to new applications by October; next September's year is still Draft and is exactly the one families should be applying to.
Which sources a family may choose¶
Admissions → Admission Sources → Offer on the Online Form.
Walk-in and Staff referral are things the office records, not things a parent picks off a list. Turn them off and they stay in the office's own dropdown while disappearing from the family's.
Accounts¶
Out of the box, families create their own accounts. A school that would rather send invitations changes Settings → Users & Companies → Customer Account to On invitation; the Apply page then tells visitors to contact the office, and that choice survives every later update.
What a family can and cannot reach¶
A family reaches their own applications and nothing else. That is enforced on the data itself, not by which links the page shows: typing another family's application number into the address bar returns not found, and so does asking for it through the system's programming interface.
The same applies to documents — a checklist row is reachable only through the application that owns it, so a student's file is never visible to an applicant.
Online applications can only be read by the family. Every change they make goes through the form, which checks that the record is theirs before it writes, and which accepts only the answers that step actually asks for.
What can go wrong¶
| What you see | What it means |
|---|---|
| Applications are closed on the Apply page | No academic year has Open for Online Applications set. |
| Choose one of the options offered | The answer posted was not one of the choices — usually a stale page left open after the school closed a year. Reload the form. |
| This file is larger than 10 MB | Photograph the document again at a lower resolution, or scan it as a PDF. |
| Give us either a mobile number or an email address | The school will not take an application it cannot answer. |
| The family says they submitted, and the office sees a draft | They stopped at the review step. The declaration has to be ticked and Submit pressed. |