Hostels and boarders

Go to Settings → Hostels.

Hostels with their gender, capacity and current occupancy.

Setting up a hostel

Select Add New.

Record the name, whether it is for boys or girls, its capacity, and the rooms or cubicles within it. Assign the matron or housemaster responsible.

Capacity matters: allocation is checked against it, so a hostel cannot be quietly over-filled.

Allocating boarders

A student is marked as a boarder on their student record, and allocated to a hostel and room.

Allocation affects more than accommodation:

• The student is billed the boarding votehead.
• They appear on the boarder lists staff work from.
• They are counted for catering.

Do the allocation at the start of term, in one pass, rather than as students arrive. Room changes during term are easier to manage against a complete starting position.

Boarder lists

Print the list per hostel at the start of term for the matron, and keep a current copy at the school office. It is the list used for the roll call, for catering numbers, and — the reason it must be right — in an emergency.

Reprint it whenever allocations change. A boarder list three weeks out of date is worse than no list, because it is trusted.

During the term

Keep exeats and sick bay recorded. A boarder who is not in the hostel tonight should be accounted for somewhere in the system, not only in someone’s memory.

Update allocations when students move rooms, on the day, not at the end of term.

Reconcile boarders against billing at the start of term: every student allocated to a hostel should be billed boarding, and every student billed boarding should be allocated. The mismatches are usually day scholars who became boarders mid-term and were never re-billed.

Boarding and other modules

Module	Connection
Finance	The boarding votehead, and pocket money
Attendance	Boarders present at roll call
Inventory	Catering and hostel consumables, by department
Communication	Messaging the parents of one hostel
Transport	Boarders travelling at half term and closing day