- 200 boarders across six dormitories now managed through a single digital platform
- Elimination of paper-based workflows
- Real-time visibility of student locations for enhanced safety
- Streamlined communications between staff, students, and families
All Souls St Gabriels, a co-educational boarding school in regional Australia, uses Orah to support efficient boarding management. With a strategic digital transformation, they improved their processes, enhanced communication between staff and families, and ultimately, delivered safer, more transparent boarding operations.
Background
All Souls St Gabriels uses Orah to understand where students are and how boarding operations can be improved. Using features within Orah, she identified that their previous paper-based system was causing significant inefficiencies in tracking student movements and managing leave requests.
As she investigated further, it became clear that there were massive opportunities to improve how staff, students, and families communicated about boarding matters. The school's historical approach involved "phone calls, text messages, emails, lots of different methods for information to come in, and it was all documented in a book." Over the following months, the team built a comprehensive digital approach – ultimately they transformed their boarding management with real-time visibility and streamlined operations.
Why All Souls St Gabriels Chose Orah
As a regional boarding school catering to students from pre-prep through to Year 12, All Souls St Gabriels had been experiencing the limitations of manual processes. Like other established boarding schools, their focus was on student care and wellbeing, but their paper-based systems weren't enabling the efficiency and transparency they needed.
When Sophie evaluated options in the Australian market, one of the first things she prioritised was finding an intuitive platform that could provide immediate visibility of student locations. Based on her assessment, she suspected that Orah could revolutionise their approach, but she wanted a solution that would work for staff who were constantly on the move.
"The interface was very appealing… plus, some of the capabilities we saw within Orah were really impressive. Just having that transparency around student movements, being able to instantly see who is on or off campus, was a key driver for us."
— Sophie Urquhart, Business Manager – All Souls St Gabriels
Implementation & Onboarding
Sophie decided to use a phased approach to implement Orah at the school. When she introduced the platform, one of the first applications was for attendance tracking – "For the first term, we pretty much just used Orah for attendance—keeping it internal," Sophie explains. This meant that they could establish the system with staff before bringing parents into the process.
The implementation revealed that the learning curve was steeper than anticipated, particularly for staff who were "not very tech-savvy and very comfortable with using paper. Their safety blanket was taken away, so the learning curve was probably bigger than I anticipated."
However, with support from the Orah team, Sophie was able to guide staff through the transition. She highlights that "the onboarding experience was pretty good overall. I had a good relationship with Nick, our Orah contact, and he really helped us through it."
After the initial internal phase, they progressed to inviting parents to start submitting leave applications through the platform. While there are still some families in remote areas with connectivity challenges, the school has made significant progress in digital adoption.
Key Features & Impact
✅ Real-Time Student Visibility & Emergency Preparedness
The most immediate benefit that Sophie and her team saw was in student tracking: With Orah, they gained instantaneous visibility into every student's location. This transformed their emergency response capabilities and day-to-day oversight.
The platform provides critical information exactly when it's needed – "At any time, I can see at my fingertips who’s there and who’s not. That’s been really positive—just having that transparency," Sophie notes. "In fire drills, for example, all the information is right there. You don’t have to go searching for it.".
✅ Shift Reports & Professional Growth
All the work that the team put into implementation also paid off with improved professional development opportunities for staff. As Orah was integrated into daily operations, the structured tools for reporting improved supervision and accountability.
"We were very paper-based, very manual... leave requests were phone calls, text messages, emails, lots of different methods for information to come in, and it was all documented in a book...now the shift reports and duty logs [in Orah] allow the Head of Boarding to review everything in real-time. It's helping our staff grow and develop their own skills," Sophie explains, detailing how Orah has transformed their boarding operations.
✅ Separate Boarding Communications
The benefits extended to communications as well, with Sophie's team adopting Orah's communications module to differentiate boarding messages from day school information.
This reinforces how the platform supports their philosophy that "Boarding is the students' home, so we wanted to keep it distinct from day-to-day school communications. Orah enables us to do that," she notes.
✅ Recreational Program Permissions & Parent Adoption
To drive further digital engagement, Sophie implemented a strategy requiring all recreational program permissions to be processed through Orah – "If a child wants to go on the field trip, they have to go through Orah. That's been a big driver to get families on board."
This approach successfully increased parent adoption of the platform, creating a more cohesive digital ecosystem for managing all aspects of boarding life.
Final Thoughts: Would Sophie Recommend Orah?
The verdict from Sophie is clear: "Yes, absolutely. If someone is coming from a paper-based system, Orah is a huge step forward. It's easy to use, intuitive, and provides the transparency we need." She acknowledges that while "there are still a few things that need to come on board to make it the complete package," the platform "has already made a big difference in how we run our boarding program."
This reinforces the power of strategic digital transformation – after all, moving from entirely paper-based processes to real-time digital management represents a fundamental shift in operational capability.
At a Glance: The Impact of Orah at All Souls St Gabriels School
- Increased transparency of student movements
- Stronger emergency preparedness with real-time data
- Improved boarding staff workflows with shift reports
- Better parental engagement via Orah's permission system
- A streamlined, mobile-friendly platform for boarding operations
Orah continues to work closely with All Souls St Gabriels to support its evolving needs, including enhancements to medication management, bus tracking, and Veracross integration.
