The calendar is the whole job

Write every date down in one place the day it is published: registration opens and closes, choice-filling closes, each round’s result, each acceptance and fee deadline, the document verification window. Put them in a calendar with alerts two days early, and treat that document as the family’s shared source of truth.

Then keep the document pack ready before it is asked for — the certificates, the identification, the photographs, whatever the specific process names. The verification window is usually short, it usually lands during a stressful week, and the families who move through it calmly are almost always the ones who assembled the folder a month earlier.