Admissions

Enquiry to enrolled, on one record.

Your admissions CRM is a second copy of your student record, maintained by hand, reconciled by somebody’s Friday afternoon. Kestrel’s pipeline is the record itself.

The second copy.

Independent schools buy an admissions CRM because the SIS module is weak. That is a rational purchase and an entire market exists to serve it. The cost is that the same family now lives in two systems: entered in one, re-entered in the other, diverging quietly from the day the offer is accepted. Each enquiry becomes a record you will type twice and reconcile forever.

One pipeline, and it is the student record.

01EnquiryCaptured from your website form, a phone call, or an open-day list. The person record is created here, once, and never again.

02TourBookable sessions with capacity, reminders and check-in. Attendance at the tour is on the record, so you know which families came.

03ApplicationBranded, school-configurable forms with document upload and application-fee payment. Conditional questions, so an international applicant is not asked about a NAPLAN result.

04InterviewScheduling with the right staff, structured notes against your own criteria, and the notes stay under admissions confidentiality.

05OfferGenerated letters and enrolment contracts, digital acceptance, deposit taken through the gateway and posted to your finance platform.

06EnrolledNothing is retyped. The applicant record becomes the student record because it always was one.

Waitlists that work the way independent schools work.

Most SIS waitlists are a date-ordered list. Yours is not, and pretending otherwise is why registrars keep a spreadsheet.

Priority rulesSibling of a current family, child of an alumnus, faith or parish criteria, staff children, date of application, weighted in the order your enrolment policy states, per entry year and per campus.

Position, honestlyA registrar can see where a family sits and why. Whether you tell the family is your policy decision.

Intake modellingKnown departures, expected acceptance rates and current waitlist depth, per year level, so Year 7 2028 is a number you can defend to your board.

Tours, open days and interviews.

Bookable events with capacity limits, automatic reminders, check-in on the day, and the resulting attendance written to the enquiry record. Families who registered and did not come are a list worth having, and most schools cannot produce it.

Offers and acceptance.

DocumentsOffer letters and enrolment contracts generated from the record, so the fee, the entry year and the conditions are never mis-typed.

AcceptanceSigned digitally by the guardians with authority to sign, which the record already knows, including where a parenting order limits it.

DepositsTaken at acceptance and posted to your finance platform. Kestrel holds the charge; your ledger holds the money.

Re-enrolmentThe same machinery runs your annual continuing-enrolment confirmation and exit intentions, which is what feeds next year’s billing.

What admissions creates.

This is the part registrars know and buyers underestimate. Admissions is where the family model gets built: who pays and in what proportion, which parent receives reports, which grandparent may collect, which sibling links to which discount. Get it right at application and the next thirteen years are clean. Get it wrong and the business office is still untangling it in Year 9.

It is also why a bolt-on CRM cannot solve this properly. The CRM captures an enquiry; it does not model a separated family with a court order and a split fee arrangement, because it was never designed to hold a record for thirteen years.

Most registrars have one waitlist or fee-split rule that no system has ever handled properly. Tell us yours and we will show you it working, or tell you plainly that it does not.

Show us your rule

Yield, without asking anyone for a report.

Conversion by stage, by source and by campaign. Where enquiries come from, where they stall, and what proportion of offers are accepted by entry year. Ask it as a question: how many Year 7 2027 offers are still unaccepted? and get the rows, the same way as everywhere else in Kestrel.

You do not have to replace your SIS to use this.

Run Kestrel admissions beside the system you already have.

Replacing a student information system is a twelve-to-twenty-four month decision with a tender attached. Fixing admissions is not, and it is usually the part that hurts most.

Kestrel’s admissions layer runs standalone and pushes accepted applicants into Synergetic, TASS or your existing system, so your registrar gets the pipeline now and your school makes the larger decision on its own timetable. If you later move the whole record across, the admissions history is already here, because it was never anywhere else.

Bring your registrar.

Forty minutes, your enrolment policy, your waitlist rules.

Book a walkthrough