Hostel Management for International Schools

Every boarder record has a country-appropriate visa data structure. UK international schools track Tier 4 CAS numbers, sponsor licence data, and ATAS statements. Canadian schools track study permits with IRCC identifiers. US schools track F-1 or J-1 SEVIS numbers. Australian schools track subclass 500 visas. Swiss schools track the cantonal residence permit. UAE schools track the study visa with the emirate-specific reference. Bulk visa expiry alerts fire 90 days ahead so registrars renew documents in time. The platform does not lodge visa applications with governments; it tracks the documents your registrar needs to manage renewals.

The Council of International Schools accreditation cycle expects evidence across safeguarding, pastoral care, boarding practice, staff-to-boarder ratios, incident logs, and parent communication. The platform generates a CIS-format evidence bundle covering all these areas: immutable incident logs, staff duty rosters, pastoral interaction logs with appropriate privacy scoping, boarder registration data, and parent communication history. Inspection preparation that used to take 2 to 4 weeks compresses to a few hours of report generation.

Every event stored in the platform is timestamped in UTC. Each parent record has a preferred timezone (Africa/Lagos, Asia/Hong_Kong, Europe/Zurich, and so on). When a parent opens the portal, timestamps render in their preferred timezone. Automated daily digests send at a parent-configured local time such as 6am Hong Kong time, so families receive news over local breakfast. Parents can also toggle to "relative timing" (19 hours ago) if they prefer that view.

Yes. The platform supports both direct guardian records (a family friend acting as guardian) and agency-mediated guardianship. Where a family uses an AEGIS-member professional guardianship agency such as Cambridge Guardian Angels, Bright World, or similar, the agency has a scoped portal to see their assigned boarders. Pickup authorisations, exeat plans, and half-term hosting arrangements are logged jointly by the school and the agency. AEGIS accreditation status is tagged on each agency record.

Standard communications (arrival confirmation, sickbay update, permission slips, invoices, incident notification) have templates in English, Mandarin, Arabic, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German. When the school sends the communication, the platform selects the template matching the parent's preferred language automatically. Free-text messages from housemasters are sent in the housemaster's language; the parent portal offers an optional translation via a configured translation provider (Google Cloud Translation or DeepL). Human translation for critical messages remains a school decision.

Fees quote in the school billing currency (typically USD, GBP, EUR, CHF, AED, or SGD depending on location). The parent portal shows a live equivalent in the parent's home currency using a daily FX rate for reference. Actual payment can happen in the billing currency (SWIFT, Flywire, PayMyTuition) or in the parent's home currency via a payment processor that handles the conversion. Refunds return to the original payment currency with FX-loss handling logged for audit.

For one-week half-term breaks (autumn and February half-term in UK schools, October and February half-term in mainland European schools), most international boarders do not travel home. The platform tracks each boarder's half-term plan: staying on site (where the school runs holiday boarding), moving to an in-country guardian, or moving to a family friend approved by parents. The platform generates the guardian pickup manifest, records return-to-school confirmation, and satisfies the UKVI and CIS safeguarding requirement to know where every underage boarder is during closures.

Yes. Deployment scales from a small international school with 60 to 150 boarders and a single housemaster to a large elite boarding school with 800 boarders and multiple boarding houses. The community edition runs on modest self-hosted infrastructure suitable for small schools. Larger schools typically move to enterprise support and dedicated cloud hosting. Configuration effort scales with the number of boarding houses and visa jurisdictions rather than raw boarder count.