Powering School Applications

Our Story

Use the arrows to view Applicaa's journey

Our_story 1

Our_story 2

2005 - 2013

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.

In 2014, they set up Applicaa together, formerly ULAS Initially this was an online platform to help connect young people with Apprenticeships.

Our_story 3

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!

Our_story 4

2014 – 2016: We began with in-house online forms

Greenford 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.

Our_story 5

Admissions+ Pilot: Cycle 1 Sep 2016 - Aug 2017

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….

Our_story 6

Extended Pilot: Cycle 2
Sep 2017- Aug 2018

20-30 Schools that had used ULAS decided to signup for Admissions+

More schools became interested.

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.

Our_story 7

Extended Pilot: Cycle 2
Sep 2017- Aug 2018

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!

Our_story 8

+ School numbers double from 150 to 300
+ 80% of customer schools with Sixth Forms sign up to use the system for Year 7
+ Admissions+ goes international with schools from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the USA
+ Gain SIMS Accedited Integrator Status
+ Applicaa team doubles from 8 - 20+

Scale Up: Sep 2019 - Date

Our Values

Integrity

We believe that “You are as good as your words”. We value our word and fulfill our commitments

Creativity

At our core, we love technology and enjoy finding creative solutions to help our customers with old and emerging problems

Teamwork