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Apply for teacher training - 15. Carrying over applications

Date: 2020-08-12

Status

Accepted

Context

The current recruitment cycle ends on 18th September 2020. At that point there will be some candidates who could benefit from their application being carried over to the next cycle. Carrying over an application means the candidate can apply to courses in the new recruitment cycle without having to fill in the whole application form again.

Carrying over an application makes sense in the following states

Before the application reaches the provider

These applications could be carried over because the provider has not seen them yet.

  • Withdrawn
  • Unsubmitted
  • Ready to send to provider

After the application can’t progress any further

These applications could be carried over because they have reached an unsuccessful end state. Enabling candidates to turn these into fresh applications in the next cycle makes it as easy as possible for them to try again.

  • Conditions not met
  • Offer withdrawn
  • Offer declined
  • Application cancelled
  • Rejected

Carrying over an application does not make sense in the following states

While the application is already under consideration by the provider

  • Awaiting provider decision

When the application already has an offer in flight

  • Offer
  • Meeting conditions (i.e. offer accepted)
  • Recruited

Copying the Apply again approach

The current approach for moving applications into Apply again is to copy the entire application (including references) and invite the user to add a new course choice. This approach seems like it will work here too, with a couple of extra things to take into account:

  • applications that are carried over might be in Apply 1 or Apply again as the cycle ends. All carried-over applications should start over as Apply 1 applications applications moving into Apply again all have complete references because they’ve already completed Apply 1, for which references are required.
  • Carried over applications might have no references, references in flight, or completed references.

Moving the new application into the next cycle is a question of making sure its course choices come from that cycle. As long as carrying over is only possible once the current cycle is closed, this should present no problems because the available courses will all come from the new cycle.

Decision

  • We will only allow applications to be carried over once the current cycle is over, and we’ll only allow applications in the above states
  • To carry over an application, we will adopt the Apply again pattern of cloning the ApplicationForm and removing the courses
  • We will copy references onto the carried-over application, but only if they’re complete. Referees who had been contacted but had not responded before the application was carried over will need to be cancelled.
  • The applications that were carried over will remain in the database without any further state change
  • Applications which were not yet sent to the provider at end of cycle and also not carried over will still be in the database — we would like to mark these with a new state equivalent to “incomplete at end of cycle”. This state would never be visible to providers.
  • It’s up to the candidate whether to carry over their application, and we’ll give them a button to do this