Created by Teachers

Applicaa was created by two teachers from London, Guthrie and Tim. They saw students being lost to competitor schools in the area and set about creating a technical solution to this issue.

Today, we work with more than 1,400 schools!

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The Applicaa Story

2005 - 2013

Applicaa Initiative

Tim was a Geography teacher who worked in the Sixth Form at Greenford High School, where he met his co-founder Guthrie, also a Geography teacher.
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In 2014, they set up Applicaa together, formerly ULAS Initially this was an online platform to help connect young people with Apprenticeships.

2013 - 2015

Greenford High Sixth Form under pressure.

Numbers were down 20-30% increasing pressure on funding, the Head and the SLT.

We needed to find a solution!

2014 - 2016

We began with in-house online forms

Tim was a Geography teacher who worked in the Sixth Form at Greenford High School. He tried to develop an online admissions system in-house and experimented with online forms.

Tim could see there were too many time-consuming processes. Enrolment day was still managed on paper & data manually entered into SIMS.rd High School, where he met his co-founder Guthrie, also a Geography teacher. In 2014, they set up Applicaa together, formerly ULAS Initially this was an online platform to help connect young people with Apprenticeships.

Sep 2016 - Aug 2017

Admissions+ Pilot: Cycle 1

In 2016 we started to build a system with the aim to get it ready for Enrolment day in August 2017. The system had helpful features such as reference collection and course availability triggered by results.

Enrolment Day: moderately successful, a lot to work on. Now we needed to work out how to get the data into SIMS….

Sep 2017- Aug 2018

Extended Pilot: Cycle 2

20-30 Schools that had used ULAS decided to signup for Admissions+
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More schools became interested.
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Enrolment day: A heavy load, the system went down. We had under-estimated the volume of users.

The silver lining! Those schools that did complete enrolment were able to transfer some student data into SIMS which saved them a huge amount of time.

Sep 2018- Aug 2019

Build Foundation: Cycle 2

Servers were upgraded to Amazon Web Services. Over the next week, 100 new schools come on board, including a couple of MATs, the Academies Enterprise Trust and Redhill Academy.

Our Year 7 focused product was born and our first Independent School signed up. More data became available to transfer into SIMS, Progresso and Bromcom.

Enrolment Day: Schools are happy, faith is restored. Hallelujah!