Institutions is the list of every school, training centre and university that uses Ekati. One row is one school, and the fields on that row are not decoration: the Program and Sub System you set here decide which academic vocabulary the school works in, and the Published flag decides whether its website is on the internet at all.

Only a super administrator sees this screen. It is the one place where a school exists before anyone has logged into it — the account is created here, its plan is attached to it, and everything it will ever hold is scoped to it. For everybody else, their school is a background fact: they see their own name on every screen and never need this list.

There are two ways an institution comes to exist. Most often, a school applies, you approve the application, and the institution is created for you from what the applicant wrote. Occasionally you create one directly — for a school that has already been onboarded by telephone and never filled in the form.

Four regimes

Basic Education, Secondary Education, Vocational and University are the four regimes. The regime is not a label for your report: it decides how the school talks about its structure. A basic-education school has class streams; a university has levels and programmes of its own shape, and the terms used throughout the portal follow the regime.

Sub system is about the language of teaching

Anglophone, Francophone and Bilingual record how the school actually teaches. It matters for the documents families receive and for the school’s own website, because those are written in the language of instruction first.

The regime also sets the wording on the public site

When a school’s website is created, it starts with wording drawn from its regime: a basic-education school is offered Classes and Teachers, a secondary school Subjects, a vocational centre Training programs and Instructors, a university Programs and Faculty. The school’s own settings can override any of it, but the starting point is already right for most schools.

Set it once and do not oscillate

Changing a regime later rewrites the vocabulary a school’s staff have learned to read in. If you chose the wrong one at approval, change it once, tell the head of school, and leave it alone.

Location and public contacts

Country and city are pickers, not free text, which is what makes them useful later: the same city then appears the same way on every fee receipt, every report slip and every letter the school sends. Add the street address, and set the public email and public phone to numbers the office actually answers. These are the details a parent copies onto an enrolment form, so a typo here is a typo on paper.

Tagline and About Us are written twice

Both fields hold English and French. The Tagline is the one line under your school’s name — “Excellence, discipline, service” or its French equivalent. About Us is the paragraph that appears at the foot of your public site and in the header of your documents. Write both languages properly: this is the copy a prospective parent reads before deciding whether to phone you, and it is rarely read twice.

The slug is worth choosing deliberately

The Slug becomes part of the school’s address in links and on printed documents. Choose something short and stable — the school’s name in lowercase, without accents or punctuation. Changing it after the school has been sending families links is a support call waiting to happen.

You can edit from the table

Most of the identity fields — name, slug, program, sub system, city, country, published — are editable directly in the table row, without opening anything. Open the school only when you are changing the description, the contacts or the about text.