What an RFP should say about admissions and enrollment

Describe the school and journey

State campuses, grades, applicant volume, calendar, languages, current systems, family journeys, phase-one scope, desired outcome, decision timeline, and constraints. Ask for inquiry, application, documents, assessment, decision, offer, acceptance, waitlist, enrollment, and withdrawal responses.

Write requirements around actors, data, decision, permission, approval, exception, family message, handoff, and acceptance test.

Require evidence and boundaries

Require vendors to label native behavior, configuration, integration, manual work, roadmap, and unknowns. Use incomplete, duplicate, changed-guardian, rejected-document, waitlist, withdrawal, family-access, and enrollment-handoff scenarios.

Record observed result, school responsibility, vendor responsibility, support route, limitation, and unresolved risk.

Include governance and delivery

Ask about identity, documents, roles, exports, retention, suppliers, subprocessors, incidents, recovery, migration, validation, training, support, monitoring, and contract end. GOV.UK guidance recommends minimum necessary data, access control, security, supplier accountability, incidents, and end-of-contract handling.

The U.S. Department of Education data governance checklist connects quality, access, security, lifecycle, sharing, disposal, and monitoring.

Make commercial answers comparable

Request subscription, setup, migration, integration, payment, training, support, growth, reporting, internal capacity, export, retention, and contract-end costs. Publish scoring and hold criteria before responses arrive.

Make the next action clear

Use this guidance to improve one bounded part of what an RFP should say about school admissions software. Name the owner, affected record, evidence needed, and review date. Keep the test small enough for admissions staff to complete and specific enough for a later audit.

Check both an ordinary application and one meaningful exception. If either depends on undocumented knowledge, add the missing definition, training note, permission rule, or support route before calling the next step ready.

Record what changed, what remains manual, and who reviews the result before the next admissions cycle.