Free Admissions Management for Boarding Schools, International + Domestic in One Pipeline

Day-school admissions ends at the offer and enrollment in a class. Boarding stacks a second tier: visa and CAS letters for international students, named guardianship for minors living away from parents, dormitory allocation, room-share preferences, medical and dietary information for the matron, and a fee structure that splits tuition from boarding. OpenEduCat's admission module carries those fields and gates through the pipeline natively. Schools that try to run boarding admissions on day-school software end up rebuilding the missing layer in spreadsheets, which is where lost guardianship paperwork and missed visa deadlines come from.

The applicant file has a guardianship section capturing the named guardian, their contact details, the guardianship agency if used, the relationship to the applicant, and the signed agreement uploaded as a document. Admissions verifies the guardian against the school's approved-guardians or AEGIS-accredited agency list. The required-document checklist blocks the offer from being released until guardianship is in place for any minor living away from a parent, which keeps the school compliant with its own safeguarding policy without relying on staff memory.

The application form captures siblings currently enrolled, alumni parents or grandparents, and the applicant's current school. The pipeline tags those applications with priority flags and surfaces them in a priority-review view ahead of the general cohort. The decision still belongs to the admissions committee, but the system enforces visibility and review order per your written policy, and the rationale for each offer or decline is logged. That is what fairness audits, board reviews, and inspections want: a defensible record that the policy was applied consistently.

Every status change, document verification, interview note, and offer is logged with timestamp and user, which is the audit trail an inspector or accreditor expects when asking how the school manages safeguarding for international minors. The workflow is designed to align with the Council of International Schools accreditation framework for international boarding and the Boarding Schools' Association Commitment to Care, both of which expect documented guardianship, medical information at point of enrollment, and a clear chain of who verified what. The system is a record, not a replacement for the Designated Safeguarding Lead's judgement.

Ravenna, SchoolMint Enroll, Finalsite Enrollment, and Veracross Admissions are mature SaaS products with polished parent UX and managed hosting, and several ship boarding modules. They price accordingly, typically tens of thousands of US dollars per year for a single mid-sized boarding school once boarding modules and integrations are included. OpenEduCat trades some of that polish for full source-code ownership, no per-applicant fees, and the ability to customise forms, pipeline stages, guardianship rules, and house-allocation logic without filing a vendor change request. Schools that want a managed experience and have the budget usually prefer the proprietary platforms. Both choices are legitimate, evaluate against your IT capacity, not just sticker price.

On acceptance the applicant converts to a student in openeducat_core, is allocated to a boarding house and room in the hostel module, and assigned a fee plan splitting tuition, boarding, meals, laundry, and any sibling or scholarship discounts. The matron sees the new boarder on the dormitory roster with room-share preferences and dietary notes, the bursar sees the fee schedule with the deposit credited, and the parent portal shows one view across admissions, fees, and pastoral. That is the part boarding admissions directors tell us saves a week of September re-keying.