A&T Back Office Overview
Admissions and Transfers (A&T) Back Office enables Local Authorities (LAs) to manage the process of transferring students from one school to another.
Admissions and Transfers can automate the allocation of places based on published admission numbers, oversubscription criteria and local and government policy, resolving multiple offers to a single offer. It also supports both in year (casual) admissions and the appeal process.
One Admissions and Transfers:
- Is fully compliant with government requirements and meets the current Code of Admissions.
- Complies with government guidelines on the secure exchange of data between admissions authorities and schools.
- Transfers data between admissions authorities in a DfE-defined XML format.
- Has a variety of data entry methods, including an integrated online application system (Admissions and Transfers Online) for use by feeder schools and applicants.
Applications
Applications can be received from the School Admissions Portal, paper submissions or can be cloned from existing applications. Cloning is generally used when a parent/carer fills out duplicate application forms for several children as part of a joint In Year application (because they have several children of similar age who they want to attend the same school).
- Incorporates user-defined special reasons and Admissions criteria in the transfer group set-up process.
- Enables school preferences to be entered via either A&T Online, standard file transfer formats or manual entry.
- Adds data from electronic applications that cannot be matched with existing information as new, so that it does not have to be re-entered.
- Automatically matches English applications with available places using the equal preference process.
- Reduces multiple offers to the best available from the parents’ choices.
- Automatically ranks children on the waiting list so that the highest are easily identifiable and can be offered places as those places become available.
- Allocates according to Local Authority (LA) and Own Admissions Authority school policies and uses the DfE's admissions schemas to manage the interactions between admission authorities (English LAs).
- Tracks and records changes within the allocation process.
- Enables management of in year (casual) admissions, including recording the details of schools approached during the relocation process.
Appeals
- Records details of appeals submitted, including hearing dates, notes of meetings and the results of any decisions made.
- Provides for multiple appeals.
Letters and Reports
- Provides reports and letters including the statutory Appeal Results report.
Integration
- Records applicant details, preferences and links to existing applicant data held in the One pupil database, PULSE.
- Is integrated with the One Transport and SEN modules and with the ArcView and MapInfo GIS solutions.
- Access to Admissions and Transfers Back Office
Admissions and Transfers Back Office is only available for users who have been given at least read permissions to one of two key processes:- Retrieving Application Summary information. This permission can be granted to a group of users by opening Tools | Permissions | User Group Processes in the v4 Client, selecting the Admissions Applications main business process and setting at least read access to Applications by Student.
- Retrieving Transfer Group Sub Group information. This permission has been included for the benefit of users who do not have access to student information but can set up or retrieve transfer group related data. This permission can be granted to a group of users by opening Tools | Permissions | User Group Processes in the v4 Client, selecting the Admissions Set Up and Population main business process and setting at least read access to Applications Administration.
- Navigation in Admissions and Transfers
The main workflow for navigating through an entity’s information in Admissions and Transfers Back Office is to:- Navigate to the appropriate area (for example Students | All Students).
- Search for and select the entity, for example the student. Entity details are displayed in the right-hand side panel.
- Navigate to related information about the entity using the right-hand panel.
- Example 1: After navigating to a student, you can choose to open application details by clicking on the links displayed under either the Current or Past Applications areas, or Add a new application.
- Example 2: After navigating to an application, you can navigate back to the Student Details page by clicking on the Full Student Details (Leave Applications Page) link.
- Example 3: After navigating to the Bases | Receivers area and selecting a receiver, you can drill down to the individual application details for a listed student by clicking on that student’s name in the list. You can also navigate to the Preferences History for the selected preference by clicking Offer Status.
To help navigation, the Open New Tab hyperlink is available from the focus bar within any main screen in A&T v4 Back Office. This link enables users to open multiple tabs or windows without having to log in each time (specific behaviour depends on a user’s tab and pop-up window settings in their Internet browser). The default landing point for each newly opened tab/window is the Student Search, but from there you can navigate anywhere within One v4 Online.
The same session details are retained, meaning that if there is activity in one of the open areas, the session will not time out in any of the areas.
The tab name changes from One Online to represent the selected area or entity, e.g. Student: Jane Smith or Receiver: Green Abbey Secondary School.
Users can open multiple student applications at the same time as well as review a receiver’s waiting lists or process transfer group information.