Although Year 12 enrolment day happens every year and schools have developed many quick and efficient processes to make the day as smooth as possible, there are always new challenges and new ways of managing things. Your school may have new staff who’ve not previously been involved in an enrolment day, some students may not turn up, and some don’t get the required grades. Schools are always looking to continually improve things to ensure the best experience for students.
At Applicaa, we support 1,000 schools with their admissions, of those 500 have a Sixth Form and will be using Admissions+ for enrolment day. Here are some common areas schools we work with consider to ensure they deliver a really smooth experience.
Should I stagger the student enrolment process?
Some schools enrol internal students first and then external students; some enrol high achievers first and then remaining students on enrolment day.
There are different options for staggering the workload and making the day as smooth as possible. If you stagger the process, will you have morning and afternoon sessions or will you opt to manage the process over two days?
The advantages of a staggered approach are that your internal students are on-site early in the day as they generally come in to collect their GCSE results at school, whereas external candidates will take longer to make it over to your school if they are attending their current school first to pick up their results. This can create natural morning and afternoon cohorts for enrolment.
Knowing your internal student’s grades the day before, you’re able to verify and check these first to get ahead. If your school uses Admissions+ you can import all your internal student grades quickly and have them ready in the system on the morning of enrolment day.
How many laptops and meeting spaces do we need?Â
Most schools set up several tables with laptops where students can sit down with a member of staff and check through their enrolment details in person, this gives the opportunity for staff and students to ask any questions.
External students may need additional support entering their achieved grades, for example, they may not know the name of their exam board. With Admissions+, the student’s GCSE certificates can easily be uploaded into the system to evidence grades and ensure staff involved can easily see the achieved grades within the system.
When is the best time to ‘Admit’ external students into your MIS?
If you admit external students early into your MIS a student who doesn’t show up on the first day of term will start the year with an ‘N’ code. They often won’t tell you they’ve changed their mind about coming to your school. If they then turn up at a different Sixth Form, two schools will have the same student on roll which then causes issues with census returns and funding agencies.
If you need to remove a student from your MIS after they have previously been admitted this typically locks the database for a few minutes so would be best done at the end of a school day. For these reasons, many schools opt for admitting students after they have physically shown up on the first day of term, students can then be admitted and given their admissions number on day one avoiding these issues.
How do you best support students who miss entry requirements?
If students miss entry requirements, schools have one-to-one conversations with them to assess whether they qualify to take a different subject route or different courses. With lots of new options opening up students could consider alternative A-level subjects, BTECs, or T-levels, and many schools are able to accommodate students onto these other options.
Should I bring the whole process online?
As well as smoothing the processes above, our software enables easy online checking and completion of enrolment for each student. You can create timetables online which saves a huge amount of time. Over the last few years, we have listened to feedback from schools using our platform and have added the additional features below.
- Separating the Enrolment Form from the main School Application Form
- Having an option to automatically synch your test enrolment system with your live system
- Grouping all Enrolment Day Settings into one place on the platform
- Ability to accept multiple students quickly into the ‘details to be checked’ area
- Added validation step when updating multiple student statuses to avoid mistakes
- Customisation of your own embargo start time and end time
- Controlling which students can access the enrolment phase
We have seen firsthand how Admissions+ can help schools to maximise the number of students in the Sixth Form because the process is quick and easy. Plus all your data security needs are covered as we are ISO27001 certified.
Another key benefit of the online process is live data updates showing which classes are filling up and notifying staff if additional classes need to be put on and for which subjects. Since the pandemic, some schools have continued with entirely remote enrolment, meaning external students can log in online, upload copies of their exam results then wait to hear from the school on whether they’ve been successful and what courses they’ve been enrolled on without needing to visit the school.
If your school is thinking about an online enrolment process for next year, please email us at [email protected] for more information.
We would like to wish all students the best of luck with their GCSE results this week!Â