Dilworth School

Dilworth School in Auckland has been boarding boys for over a century. Each Friday afternoon, most of its 1,090 students head home. A core group of around 50 stay on campus for the weekend. Until recently, knowing exactly who was staying, whether their parents knew, and whether that matched what students had told staff was something nobody could answer with confidence.

Multiple channels, no single picture of where students were

Before Orah, parents and students had several ways to report an absence or request leave: phone calls, emails, and messages sent directly to house staff. There was no single record. For Luke Barnard, who became Director of Boarding at Dilworth in July 2023, the fragmentation created a persistent accountability gap.

The weekend stay-back process was the clearest symptom. Dilworth had wanted a formal workflow where students apply to remain on campus for Friday or Saturday nights and parents approve it. They tried to build this in Reach, the previous boarding platform. It never landed. "I think Reach had the ability to do that, but we tried to get it rolled out and it just wouldn't work," Barnard recalls.

Without a formal process, a loophole persisted. A student could tell staff he wasn't staying in, then tell his parents he was and go elsewhere. "There's a little bit of a loophole where a boy could say, yeah, yeah, I'm staying in, mum. But then he says to us, no, I'm not staying. And then he goes to his girlfriend's place, which is actually an example that happened a few years back," Barnard says.

Customer support made the difference at the point of decision

Dilworth had already been using Orah for student wellbeing since 2022, running mood checks and pastoral notes through the Nurture module. When it came time to move boarding operations off Reach, the case for consolidating into one platform was straightforward. Barnard had a clear view on which way to go.

"One of the things that swayed me in Orah's favour was actual customer support," he says. He had shared that view with other heads of boarding at a sector conference. The responsiveness he had experienced through the wellbeing rollout gave him confidence that the boarding expansion would be handled well.

Leave, stay-backs, and 1,384 mood checks per month, all on one platform

Once boarding went live on Orah in January 2026, Barnard moved decisively. He consolidated all leave and absence management onto the platform, removing every parallel channel that had existed before. "I said, well, why don't we just use one platform? And then parents don't have the option of different ways of communicating that their boys are away," he explains.

The stay-back workflow followed. Students now submit requests through Orah. Parents receive them and approve or decline before anything is confirmed. The process that could never be rolled out on Reach was operational within weeks. "When we got Orah on board, I said, right, we're just going to do it. I'm not going to ask. I'm going to tell. And that's actually tidied up our weekend stay-back applications a lot more," Barnard says.

Beyond leave management, Dilworth's pastoral teams use Orah's wellbeing features heavily across both boarding houses and the day school. Students complete mood checks each month, generating 1,384 check-ins. Boarding house leaders can pull up a mood snapshot for their house in seconds. The AI-generated summaries of pastoral records have changed how the team reviews student welfare. "I like the AI summaries of pastoral records as well. All that sort of stuff has really integrated a lot more than it previously was," Barnard says.

Parent uptake exceeded expectations

The most visible result has been in parent engagement. "The uptake from the parents has been amazing. And we're using that leave exclusively now for that," Barnard says. What had been scattered across phone calls, emails, and direct messages now exists as a single auditable record that boarding staff, day school administration, and parents all see.

With 10 boarding houses and students spread across three campuses, that unified view matters. "The integration of what we're doing in boarding is greater now because we can look at wellbeing really quickly, get a mood check for your boarding house," Barnard explains. Today Dilworth processes over 10,780 passes per month, completes 1,384 student wellbeing checks per month, and has 99% of students active in the platform.

The rollout happened without meaningful IT support. Barnard built around 20 training videos, ran lunchtime sessions for staff, and managed the data migration largely on his own. What made it manageable was how the platform is designed. "For someone like me who's the school administrator, I can do a lot of this stuff myself without having to reach out to you guys. That's pretty powerful as well."

"The integration of what we're doing in boarding is greater now because we can look at wellbeing really quickly, get a mood check for your boarding house."
Luke Barnard, Director of Boarding, Dilworth School [lightly edited for clarity]

What they're building toward

Barnard is working with the Orah team on a targeted gap in the stay-back workflow: parents currently receive a notification when a student's stay-back is approved, but not when the student withdraws. Closing that loop would give parents full visibility on both sides of the decision.

Dilworth also sees potential in connecting student location changes to other parts of the platform. If a student signs out to go home, Orah could automatically pause his scheduled medications, removing a manual step that currently falls on staff.