The admission application form is what families fill out when they apply to your school. Unlike the inquiry form — which is a single contact-collection moment — the application form is a multi-step wizard you design from scratch. Schools own the entire flow. Swiss Private Schools only mandates the trailing screens (Consents → Review → Payment → Done); everything before that is yours.
How questions are organized
Your form is built from steps and questions. A step is a page in the wizard. A question lives inside one step. Drag-and-drop in the builder reorders questions within a step; moving a question to a different step is done from the "Advanced" section of the question modal.
Each question stores its answer in a JSONB column keyed by the question's UUID. This means you can rename, reorder, or delete questions without breaking historical applications — past answers keep their key and remain readable from the application detail view.
Picking a question type
The builder offers twelve question types, grouped into three categories: Input (text, number, email, phone), Selection (options, checkbox, country, language, education-level), and Special (date, conditions, file). The type determines:
- Which widget the family sees on the public form
- Which validation runs at submit time
- Which shape the answer takes in the JSONB column
Most schools use 8–12 question types in their form. The full catalog is there for edge cases — for example, conditions renders a consent paragraph with optional signature collection, useful for legal acceptances mid-form.
Pre-filling from the family's account
Several question types support auth pre-fill: when the family first opens your form, the question is pre-populated from their Swiss Private Schools account. The three sources:
auth.email— pre-fills with the parent's account emailauth.name— pre-fills with first + last nameauth.locale— pre-fills with the language the family is browsing in
Pre-fill happens once on first open. Subsequent edits stay under the family's control — if they want to override their account email for this specific application, they can.
Using templates
Platform-curated templates let you clone a complete set of steps + questions in one click. The current templates cover common boarding-school flows (student info, parent contacts, medical consent, prior schooling). Templates are apply-once — after cloning, the steps and questions belong to your school outright. Future template updates do not propagate to schools that already cloned the older version.
If you find yourself recreating the same custom question across multiple application forms, write us and we'll consider it for the template catalog.
Translating your form
When auto-translate is on (Settings → Translation), saving a question in English fans out to French, German, and Italian via DeepL in the background. You can review and override any locale from the question modal's Translations tab.
For sensitive wording (legal consents, medical questions), turn off auto-translate for that specific question and edit each locale manually — DeepL is good but not perfect for legal phrasing.
Testing your form
Before going live, click Preview in the Admissions tab to walk through the form as a family would see it. The preview renders against your current draft and surfaces any required fields the family must complete to submit.
Best practice: have someone unfamiliar with the form complete it end-to-end. They'll find friction you've become blind to — confusing labels, missing helper text, ambiguous required fields.
Common pitfalls
- Don't mark everything required. Optional fields keep completion rates high. Mark required only what you truly need before reviewing an application.
- Long questions kill completion. If a question needs more than two sentences of context, split it into a step intro + a shorter question.
- Ask for files only when you'll use them. Document-upload questions add friction. Many schools collect documents in a follow-up email after the application — keep the form light.
- Test on mobile. A significant share of applications start on parents' phones. Date pickers and long option lists are the most common mobile pain points.
What happens after submission
Submitted applications appear in your Admissions tab with status Submitted. From there your team can review, request documents, schedule an interview, and ultimately accept or decline. Each transition is logged in the application timeline, and the family receives a templated email at each step (which you can override per-school in Settings → Email templates).