Over 150 schools are part of an online platform for school admissions that provides parents the convenience of choosing and applying to an institution for their children from their homes.

A common online gateway called admissiontree.in, an initiative by ABP which publishes The Telegraph, is a one-stop platform for picking the most preferred school. It completed a year on Tuesday.

South Point, Birla High School and Sushila Birla Girls’ School are some of the new additions this year.

Modern High School for Girls had chosen the platform for admission to their international curriculum for senior classes.

Delhi Public School New Town, Delhi Public School Megacity, Shri Shikshayatan School, Indus Valley World School, BD Memorial, Rammohan Mission High School are some of the others who are part of the platform.

Parents can log on to www.admissiontree.in and can directly make a choice and apply without facing the hassle of checking individual websites or collecting forms from schools or going to schools to drop the forms.

Once parents go to the website they can see the heads of admission and information. For admission they get a choice of schools where they can pick the school, give the date of birth of the child, pay the fees and submit the form.

It is the only common online gateway for school admissions in the country, which school administrators and parents say will ease the process even more in the wake of the pandemic-induced lockdown.

Some of the schools have already given out the dates for entry-level admissions for the 2021-22 session and some will make the announcements soon.

Heads of institutions feel it has given the schools a “common platform”.

South Point, which has already announced the dates, feels they will have a much “wider reach” through this platform.

“It will give us a much wider reach. Lots of parents who are looking for schools use this platform and because of ABP and The Telegraph our reach automatically widens. More than the technological support, aligning with admissiontree will enable more people to reach out to us,” said Krishna Damani, trustee of South Point.

There are many institutions which have joined in the second year.For example, last year it was only Birla High School Mukundapur. This year, Sushila Birla Girls’ School and Birla High School have also joined.

“The outreach has increased immensely and many more people contacted the school, which was not possible otherwise,” said Brigadier V.N. Chaturvedi (retd), the secretary-general, of Vidya Mandir Society, which runs the three schools.

Apart from the application process the platform provides relevant information on schools to allow parents to make an informed choice.

“Among different digital initiatives, digitisation of school admission procedure is one of the latest feathers in the ABP cap. It has given the ease to schools and parents dealing with the school admission procedure while transforming the process to an online one. As we complete a year we already have 150 schools who have partnered with us and many more are coming on board as we go along. In the post-Covid world, this platform has become all the more relevant and we are hopeful of scaling this up in a big way,” said D.D. Purkayastha, managing director and CEO of ABP Pvt Ltd.

Though some of the schools have a hard copy format because some parents would want to visit the school and apply, heads of institutions feel it would take a backseat this year and many among them will prefer an online platform.

“During the pandemic, guardians will not prefer to come and take the forms physically and the shift this year will be more towards an online platform,” said Arnab Chandra, rector of Vivekananda Mission School.

St Augustine’s Day School in Barrackpore and Shyamnagar are preparing all materials to start the process in August.

“This year it will be much larger than last year because parents are getting used to the online mechanism. In fact, prospective parents will understand that our school is technologically advanced and prefer the online mode,” said Janet Gasper Chowdhury, president of The St Augustine Education Society that runs the two schools.