I spent seven years working inside schools before I joined Faria as a solutions consultant for OpenApply. I thought that meant I understood admissions from every angle worth understanding. Then I became a parent looking for a school for my own daughter, and I realised I'd only ever seen the job from one side of the desk.
The part I still find funny is that the school I chose runs on OpenApply. I didn't know that when I chose it. I wasn't looking at admissions software. I was looking for a school, and I picked it for all the ordinary reasons a parent picks a school. It was only later, after a year away from the sector and a fairly unrelated turn into a job at Faria, that I sat through a product demo and realised I recognised the checklist on the screen. I'd filled one in myself.
I want to tell you what the search looked like from the other side of the desk, before I knew any of that, because it changed how I think about the work we do here.
The search beginsCalling my friends before I called any school
The first thing I did, before I filled in a single form, was call the friends I had whose children were already in school. Not the schools themselves. Not the glossy prospectuses. My friends. I wanted to know what it was actually like, not what a website told me it was like.
It turns out that's not an unusual instinct.
of private-school families in one study said the people they talked to were mostly other parents already in private education, with school a regular topic among friends and relatives. Tarkhnishvili, L. & Tarkhnishvili, A. (2022). "Factors Influencing the Choice of Private or Public School."
Word of mouth, a trusted conversation, someone who's already lived through the process telling you the truth about it. Schools spend a lot of time, money and energy on the version of themselves they present in a brochure. But in reality, families make their decision based on the version their friends actually experienced.
Once I'd narrowed things down and started applying, the differences between schools showed up almost immediately, and not in the way I expected.
ApplyingThe silence was the thing that got me
Some schools came back to me quickly, with exactly the information I needed. It built confidence straight away. I felt like I mattered to them before I'd even had a tour.
Other schools went quiet. Not rude or dismissive, just quiet. And I started assuming the worst. Had they received my application? Had I done something wrong? Was my daughter's place already at risk before we'd even started? Of course, none of that was rational, but I imagine that's how a lot of parents feel in that situation.
Not because the education was better on paper than the alternatives, but because I always knew what was happening next. There were no gaps where my imagination got to fill in the worst-case scenario.
Staying chosenThe relationship didn't stop after the first reply
The most surprising thing for me was that I assumed the hard bit was getting a good first response, and then things would settle down. In practice, that's exactly where some schools started to lose me. In the middle part, after the first inquiry and before any decision was made.
The school I chose didn't let that happen. After I paid the registration fee, they invited me to a Christmas event for prospective and current families. I met the reception teachers there. I remember thinking, quite suddenly, that I'd stopped picturing myself applying to this school and started picturing myself already part of it. That shift, from applicant to belonging, happened because they kept finding small, well-timed reasons to stay in touch, not necessarily because of a big gesture.
Coming backComing back to this industry with new eyes
I stepped away from the school sector for a year after that. When I came back and joined Faria as a solutions consultant for OpenApply, I found myself wanting to talk about everything I'd just experienced firsthand, because I think it's genuinely easy for admissions teams to forget what it feels like from the family's side. You get busy. You're wearing multiple hats.
Now, when I sit with schools and walk them through OpenApply, I'm not just demonstrating features. I'm recognising, constantly, the exact moments that either reassured me or worried me as a parent, and pointing at the part of the system built to handle them.
A curious parent can leave their details before they're ready to formally enquire. I'd have used that. It takes the pressure off feeling like you have to commit before you're ready.
It records a missed call, or a comment from a tour, directly onto a family's record. Every "did they get my message?" spiral I put myself through never needed to happen if the answer was simply logged somewhere visible.
Paired with the option to personalise them properly with mail merges rather than sending something generic. That's the difference between "we haven't forgotten you" and a form letter that makes you feel like a number.
OpenApply works with iSAMS, ManageBac+, or whatever a school has already invested in, rather than asking them to rip it all out. Schools don't lose momentum adopting something that has to fight the rest of their infrastructure first.
None of this is hypothetical for me. I've felt the absence of every one of these things as a parent, and I now spend my working life helping schools put them in place for the families coming after me.
Why it holds upWhy I still believe this, professionally
I know how this sounds, coming from someone who works here. "Of course she'd say the tools are good!"
I'd ask you to weigh that the other way round instead. I didn't come to believe in this because I work at Faria. I went looking for this kind of reliability as a parent, found it painfully inconsistent across the schools I applied to, and then found myself, a year later, in a job where I get to help schools close exactly that gap.
Faria works with this problem on a real scale now. More than 10,000 schools across 155 countries, over 4 million students. That's not a statistic I quote to impress anyone. It's what convinces me that what I went through wasn't a one-off bad experience with one disorganised school. It's a pattern, repeated in enough places that it's worth solving properly rather than school by school, on goodwill and good intentions alone.
I chose a school because it never went quiet on me. I now spend my working life trying to make sure more schools never do either. And most days, I still can't quite believe that job found me by accident, through the same checklist I once filled in as a nervous parent.
If any of this sounds familiar — from either side of the desk — I'd genuinely love to talk.
Book a demo →I'll walk you through it myself.
