This research explores the enactment of the admission process in secondary schools in Maipú, a “middle-class” district of Santiago, the capital city of Chile. This research, based on a policy sociology perspective (Ozga, 1987) and policy enactment theory (Ball, Maguire, & Braun, 2012), explores the enactment of the school admission process in four schools, two public and two private subsidised. The research draws on enactment theory (Ball et al., 2012) and poststructural policy analysis (Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016). It deploys analyses of interviews and policy documents explored in two dimensions, the ‘context of practices’ and the ‘context of policy text production’(Ball, 1994a), respectively, through the analysis of interviews with the school policy actors and analysis of policy documents produced by and for the school. This original research explores the school admission process from an enactment perspective, understanding school admission as a two-way mechanism in which, simultaneously, families choose schools and schools select families. The peculiarity of school admission as a two-way process has been enunciated before from a theoretical point of view (Atria, 2007), but has not been explored from the school perspective in terms of the associated practices (Mansuy, 2016), nor from an enactment perspective. Moreover, Chile presents a distinct case because the admission system works in a one-to-one interaction, in contrast with what tends to occur in other countries, where the system works in a centralised way through a local authority (Carrasco, Honey, Oyarzún, & Bonilla, 2019). Furthermore, in Chile, this interaction has been operating in a highly marketised context during the last four decades (Bellei, 2015). The research presents two key findings related to the school admission process. The first finding is that opacity in the enactment of the admission process engenders nebulous effects, ostensibly imbuing the school policy actors with an agency-of-sorts, providing ideological cover for paving the way towards multi-layered variegated discrimination across distinct settings. This situation also means that school policy actors involved in the admission process face a trade-off in terms of equity and competition. The second finding relates to how the timing of the admission process throws up important nuances in the enactment of the policies and the strategies consequently pursued by the school policy actors. It finds that different actors engaged in these processes are influenced by the school calendar in ways thusfar underestimated by the current regulations and which urgently require deeper and more sustained attention through education policy research.