BMABA’s Open Allocation student registrations offer a unique way to effectively ‘self manage’ a pre-set batch of students at club level, without needing any intervention or reconciliation with the association. This presents a huge amount of flexibility for clubs, but it is important you understand how the process works. This tutorial aims to clarify.

Open Allocation is a term we use to describe the way in which this type of student membership is managed by clubs. The underlying insurance is exactly the same as named student insurance.

In a nutshell, open allocation works much like 'blanket cover' or 'self managed cover' in the sense that we won't ask you for the specifics of each individual student. You can use our portal to record who's covered, or - provided you keep accurate records that in the event of a claim can demonstrate a student was genuinely assigned to cover before an incident - you can self manage allocations at club level, in anyway you see fit.

You're free to assign students to cover, and then 'recycle' that licence for new students should they leave. It's flexible, affordable and works really well for clubs trying to keep admin to a minimum.

Named Student membership is fixed, meaning you need to declare the name and date of birth for each student in advance. Once assigned, there is no way to recycle or re-use that cover if the student leaves. The upside is you can use permanent tools - such as our Lifetime Student Grade Register (LSGR) for named students, but not open allocation students. With open allocation students, we can provide you with access to a fantastic 'on demand' certification tool which is free. Please click here to learn more.

The insurance is exactly the same as named students. All cover by default includes £1,000,000 Public Liability insurance, with the optional ability to add on Personal Accident cover.

As always, we fully recommend reading through the full policy documents to make sure you understand what you're covered for, and what you're not. No insurance automatically pays out and it's really important you understand the mechanics of cover properly before relying on this. We're always on hand and happy to help if needed.

Click here to view the full policy documents.

Most claims will arise from a loss of income following an injury. If our students need their physical health to earn money, and pay the rent etc, you should ensure they've considered the potential impact of an injury causing time off work before they continue in your club. We have a template article you can use which asks students to consider how any injury might impact their financial circumstances, and asks them to consider approaching standalone insurers who can offer enhanced loss of income cover if it's needed. Asking a student to sign this can help you if you need to defend the exclusion of personal accident.

You can access the template documents in MyBMABA, here.

Pay as you go pricing works at £2.40 per student allocation, per year for between 0-10 students, with substantial discounts for more registrations.

It's usually more economical to purchase a block of student cover at once, to secure the best 'unit cost' for student cover. You can choose to pay monthly, but there is a small additional cost for doing so. All of our open allocation cover is discounted based on bulk. You'll find the summary pricing below. If you'd like to purchase a block of students, please contact the team via chat or [email protected] and we can have this setup for you immediately. Alternatively, click here to purchase online.

You can add to your number of open allocations at any point during the year by jumping onto webchat or dropping us an email, and requesting X more students. These will always be quoted and setup pro-rata unless you tell us otherwise, so the additional allocations will tie in to your club renewal.

If, for example, you have 220 students registered you'll be on the discounted £0.91 per student rate. You can add a further 10 at this discounted rate, but please make sure you remind the team you have bulk pricing assigned or they may automatically use the above pricing instead!

To view and manage open allocation students, visit the open allocation part of our portal in MyBMABA.

All of your pre-paid open allocation students will show up in the form of a green button at the top of the page. If you've placed an order for open allocation students, you may need to await that order to complete before allocations show as available.

At any point you can click this to activate licences. Simply type into the modal the amount of student licences to activate, and click activate.

It can take up to 10 minutes for licences to go live for extremely large bulk, but most records will be showing your side within seconds of activation. Just refresh the browser after activating licences periodically until all new license are visible.

By default, we don't renew existing open allocation licences as they are by their nature transient, and assumed to be self-managed. This means if you renew with 100 open allocation licences, you'll typically see a further 100 open allocation licences available for adding on with the new data range.

If you'd prefer us to roll forward any existing student records, we're very happy to do so. You'll need to confirm if it's a case of renewing / moving forward all current records, or specific records. If the latter is the case, please download to CSV (using the function provided) and send us the excel document with those licences to be renewed highlighted.

Jump onto web chat if you are at all unsure and we will be happy to help.

You can quickly and easily make changes to the assigned student's name and date of birth without clicking into any other records. Simply click on any allocation within the yellow boxes (name and date of birth) and enter your changes. Clicking out of the box will immediately save that update.

Open allocation cover makes it easy and flexible to manage student insurance (often referred to as ‘member to member’) yourself at club level. Here’s the do’s and don’ts;

You can easily generate official BMABA licence slips and certification using the 'generate certificate' button.

Simply highlight the student, click 'generate certificates' and you'll see an on-screen confirmation of the certification being generated. After a few seconds, a licence slip and membership certificate will download.

You don’t have to use our template documents and you are free to create your own, or to issue no paperwork to students whatsoever. We would recommend sharing confirmation of the cover details with students on your website or member's area if you do not issue licences or other official paperwork.

You can use the above link to generate proof of registration and assignment to cover if a student requests it from you. If you need instead a document that shows all available allocations on your account, to show that you genuinely do have the right to assign cover and licencing, please ask us via web chat for a copy of an ‘open allocation cover note’. This can be provided free of charge.

You can download your student listings at any point using the 'Download CSV' and this will generate an excel download of the on-screen student details./

Sometimes if you have more than 200 licences it can be tricky to manage allocations via the portal, as it lacks some more advanced filtering that may be helpful for this scale of data. You can access the legacy portal here which will allow advanced large-data editing, however it is very feature poor. If you do not have access and require it, please let us know on web chat and we can send out an invite.

As is the case with all insurances, you must promptly report any injuries to persons, or damage to property, that may be likely to lead to a claim. If you're in any doubt, please report it without delay. Any incident that requires an accident log-book entry should absolutely be reported to us. Do not admit liability, and if contacted by a solicitor, refer them to BMABA.