Where to find it
Core › Admission Capacity. It carries its own permission, so if you cannot see it, ask your school administrator to give you Admission Capacity in Users & Privileges. Letting a held student in is a second, separate permission — Admission Approvals — because deciding how many children the school takes and deciding to go over that number are not the same job.
What it does
Write down how many seats each campus, class or section has. The page shows how many of those seats are already taken, and the dashboard shows the same three figures campus by campus: total capacity, admissions completed and seats remaining.
Nothing is stopped until you switch it on
Two things have to be true before a single admission behaves differently:
- Hold new admissions for approval when the seats are full is ticked, and
- there is a seat number covering the class the student is being admitted into.
Until then the page is a plan and nothing else. Set your numbers, watch them for a term, and turn the holding on only when you are happy with them. A class you never set a number for is never affected, whatever the switch says.
🔴 The lines are never added together
Each line is a limit of its own, arranged from the widest to the narrowest:
- Whole school — one limit for every child in the school.
- A campus — one limit for that campus.
- A whole class — one limit for the class, shared by all its sections.
- One section — that section is limited on its own.
The most specific line that fits a student is the one used. If you set the whole school to 900 and Class 1 Section A to 30, then a child being admitted into Class 1 Section A is measured against 30, and everybody else against 900. 900 and 30 are never added to make 930. That is what lets you cap one oversubscribed section without capping the school.
A column for each academic year
The first column, Standing capacity, is not a year — it is the number that applies whatever the year is. If your school has never set up academic years, this is the only column you need and everything works normally.
If you do use academic years, each one gets its own column, so you can plan next year's intake while this year is still running. Only the year marked "active" is used when a student is actually admitted; the others are there for you to fill in ahead of time. A year with no number falls back to the Standing capacity column.
🔴 A held student is not lost, and not hidden
When a class is full and holding is switched on, the admission is still saved completely. The student is in Manage Students like anybody else and you can open, edit and print their record. The only thing being held changes is that they do not count towards the seats filled — so a class of 30 keeps reading 30 of 30 with the extra children queued, instead of quietly becoming 33 of 30.
The person saving the admission sees a message naming the class that is full and its numbers, so nobody has to guess why.
Letting a student in — two ways
- Admissions › Admission Approvals in EDUBase, or
- the Owner App, where the same list appears for the institute administrator.
Both do exactly the same thing, so a student allowed in one place is never still waiting in the other. Allowing a student puts that class over the number you set — deliberately, because that is what allowing means. Refusing deletes nothing: the student's record stays exactly where it is and simply keeps not counting.
Adding many students at once
With Also apply to Add Bulk Students ticked, a batch takes the seats that are left and the rest are held — thirty rows into ten free seats admits ten and holds twenty, in the order you typed them. The message afterwards tells you exactly how many of each.
If a class already has more students than the number you type
Nothing happens to the children who are already there — nobody is ever removed. The seats simply read as full, and the next new admission is the one that gets held. The dashboard shows how many a campus is over.
Turning it off again
Untick the box to stop holding anything, or clear the number on a line to remove that limit entirely. Students already waiting stay in Admission Approvals until you decide about them.
🔴 It is not only new admissions — moving students counts too
A seat is a seat however a student comes to be sitting in it, so the same limits apply everywhere a student can arrive in or move into a class:
- Class Transfer and Batch Transfer — moving a group of students into another class or section.
- The admission form, when you edit a student and change their campus, class or section.
- Bulk Import — both a file that adds students and a file that moves existing ones (this follows the Also apply to Add Bulk Students tick box).
- Putting a student back to Currently Enrolled after they were marked left or struck off. They are taking a seat again.
What a transfer is measured against
Only the class the students are moving TO. The class they are leaving is never checked — emptying a class is never something the system stops. And a student is never counted twice: moving students within a class, or re-saving a student without changing their class at all, is always allowed, even when that class is completely full. You can always reshuffle the students you already have.
If the class you are moving into has room for some but not all of them, everyone is moved and the ones beyond the limit are marked as waiting for approval — the same way Add Bulk Students behaves. Forty students into ten free seats moves all forty and queues thirty, in the order you selected them. The message afterwards says exactly how many are waiting, and they appear in Admissions › Admission Approvals like any other held student. Nobody is left behind and no list has to be split by hand.
A student who was already waiting for approval and is then moved somewhere with a free seat is released automatically — you are not asked to decide about a class they have left.