school admissions process Archives

Everything you need to know to make the best education MIS decision for your team, your processes and, most importantly, your pupils.

Choosing the best education management information system (MIS) isn’t just about ticking boxes on a features list. It’s about ensuring every child’s journey through education is supported, visible and continuously improving. With the right MIS, schools and trusts can simplify administration, strengthen collaboration and, most importantly, improve outcomes for children.

But how do you find the best education MIS for your specific needs?

Here’s how to choose the best education MIS to deliver long-term value and real impact.

1. Start with your goals: are you focused on outcomes?

The best education MIS isn’t just a back-office tool, it’s a strategic asset. Start by identifying the outcomes you want to achieve:

Greater transparency for parents and guardians?
Reduced duplication of effort for your staff?
More informed decision making for leaders and professionals?

Impulse from CACI is designed with these goals in mind. It’s built to help you deliver better services and outcomes through a collaborative, transparent and child-centred approach.

2. Look for flexibility and scalability

Every school or trust is different. A rigid system will limit your ability to respond to changing demands. Instead, choose an education MIS that grows with you.

Impulse’s modular design means you only use what you need, from core pupil data to specialist support services, early years, EHCPs and more. You can scale up or down as your needs evolve.

3. Make sure it supports collaboration

Education is a team effort. The best education MIS should enable collaboration between schools, professionals and families with secure, structured access to the information each stakeholder needs.

With Impulse, a child’s record is accessible through tailored portals. Schools can update information, professionals can contribute assessments and parents/guardians can view relevant progress. This transparency ensures aligned support at every stage.

4. Prioritise automation and efficiency

Too many schools waste valuable time on repetitive admin. An effective MIS should automate low-value tasks, reduce duplication and streamline processes.

Impulse automates workflows and provides a centralised, shareable child record, freeing your team to focus on adding value, not manual data entry.

5. Think holistic: can you see the full picture?

Siloed data leads to blind spots. Choose a system that integrates all aspects of a child’s educational journey into a single view. This helps you and your team to understand the context of every child.

Impulse joins the dots across 17 integrated modules including SEND, Child Protection, Educational Psychology and more. Impulse helps you to identify risks earlier and deliver more coordinated, inclusive support.

6. Don’t forget support and partnership

Technology is only part of the equation. You need a partner who understands your challenges and works with you to get the most from your MIS.

Impulse from CACI is more than a product. It’s a collaborative approach. We work alongside your team to co-design your MIS usage, train your staff and ensure long term success.

The bottom line: choose a system that works with you

When evaluating MIS options, ask yourself:

Does it empower my staff and reduce their admin burden?
Does it support collaboration across my school, trust or local authority?
Will it scale with our needs as we grow or change?
Will it help us achieve better outcomes for children?

If the answer isn’t a confident “yes” to all of these – keep looking.

Or better yet, explore how Impulse from CACI can help transform how you deliver education services, meet your strategic goals and, most importantly, support every child.

Read the Impulse brochure to learn more about our approach, our modules and how we’re already helping schools and trusts deliver smarter, more efficient education support.

Appeals are an inevitable part of the school admissions process. How can they be effectively and efficiently handled to make the process easy and fair?

Effective and efficient handling of the school admissions process is essential to achieving the goal of a fair and transparent process for all. In this blog, we will look at the appeals process. Appeals are an inevitability. Every admissions authority will have to deal with them every year. In our last blog we looked at oversubscription criteria. They go hand-in-hand with appeals, since they are only required when more applications are received than there are school places available. Evidencing them, and how they’ve been adhered to, is essential to a fair and transparent appeals process.

The central tenets of the appeals process are twofold. Firstly, every parent has the right to appeal a place on behalf of their children. Secondly, the process must be fair and transparent. As we discussed previously, oversubscription criteria must be publicly available and their bespoke ordering by authority laid out.

The appeals process becomes a possibility when the authority rejects a child’s application. In rejecting it, the authority must:

Make clear the reasons why the application was rejected
Inform the parent of their right to appeal
State the deadline for submitting any appeal
Provide the necessary details to make any appeal
Inform the parent that they must set out their grounds for appeal

The report for the 2022/23 school year shows that there were 53,086 appeals; 38,186 for secondary school applications and 14,900 for primary schools. This that means that 3.5% of applications are appealed by parents. So, how can the process be handled fairly and transparently?

Efficient processing of appeals in the school admissions process

The School Admissions Code lays out that authorities must establish a panel to hear appeals. Where appeals are heard by a panel, the decision is binding; the school must either admit the child or the application is confirmed as rejected.

In the 2022/23 school year, 19.8% of appeals were successful. This shows that authorities are getting the majority of rejections right. Yet, mistakes do happen.

Technology can play a fundamental role in fair provision and oversight of the admissions process. Where a place has been rejected, for example, because a family resides outside of the catchment area, being able to show the working on this is essential. In a manual process, this means revisiting how the decision was reached. Linking to a geo-mapping application provides robust evidence in an instant.

Other criteria, such as faith, can quickly be evidenced, too. Where a parent hasn’t submitted relevant supporting documentation to evidence their child is of the same faith of the school, the authority can quickly demonstrate that other applications were accepted as a result of this.

Making the process easy for parents is paramount, too. With a parent portal, applications and appeals can be made easily and recorded against the child’s record simultaneously. This further helps with timelines, since any appeals process can be withdrawn after the established date for their submission has passed.

If a panel is convened to hear an appeal, they too can have easy access in one place to the process, the rejection and the grounds for appeal. This helps them to make better informed, fairer decisions.

Conclusion

Nothing can prevent appeals from happening. As the statistics show, they are a prevalent part of the school admission process. Rather, authorities need to be in the best possible position to respond to them.

Where the end-to-end process is handled in a central system, it makes evidence gathering, communications and reaching fair and transparent decisions much more straightforward. Messages and outcomes can be submitted and received via a central portal. This means that parents receive information instantly and can appeal via the same method.

Appeals are to be expected, so being in position to administer them is crucial. They are a central part of the overarching school admissions process. Having a system in place, linked to admissions and oversubscription criteria, helps to make the task of implanting a fair and transparent process much easier for everyone. If the system is simpler for schools and authorities, it will be for parents, too.

The technology exists now to make the admissions process easier to administer, as well as fairer and more transparent for children and their families.

This is a topic that we’ve covered in greater detail, examining the entire admissions process, in our recent white paper, A fair school admissions process for all. You can download a free copy here.

Tag: school admissions process

How to choose the best education MIS for your school or trust