Boarding has changed dramatically over the past two decades, but the core challenge remains the same: keeping students safe, accounted for, and supported — while giving staff tools that actually make their work easier. Boarding School Software didn’t begin as a business idea. It began as simple tools built to solve real problems in real boarding houses.
I grew up on a small farm in KwaZulu-Natal and became a weekly boarder from the age of six, so boarding wasn’t something I entered later in life — it shaped my earliest memories. Later, Maritzburg College, National Service and HR studies, I worked in Anglo Gold Mine Hostels where I first experimented with digital record-keeping on a Commodore 64. It didn’t become a full system, but it opened my eyes to how technology could help manage large communities and keep people safe.
Early 2003, after a year at Summit College Boarding School I moved my family to Queensland, Australia where I continued working in boarding and also taught in the classroom for many years. I served in boarding roles at All Souls St Gabriels, Tardun Agricultural College in WA, St Brendan’s College, and The Cathedral School in Townsville, Head of Boarding in the last three schools.
Back in those early Australian years, I started building small tools in Excel and Access simply to solve everyday boarding problems. My wife Jeanie, a trained Systems Analyst, has been part of the development story from the onset. As the needs grew, we brought Sajal and the Dikonia team on board to gradually turn those early Access forms into a complete platform.
Living in Queensland, has also given me the privilege of meeting many Outback families and Graziers from remote cattle stations. Their resilience, hospitality, and work ethic are remarkable, and their trust has shaped our family as much as my work and the direction of this software.
The first decade of development was about solving real boarding problems: tracking boarders reliably, managing leave, organizing pastoral notes, preparing reports, and removing duplication in daily tasks. Everything grew slowly and organically, built only out of practical necessity.
Realizing this would be a product all boarding schools can utilize, the system required multi-school architecture, role-based access, parent communication features, comply with multi regional regulations and more sophisticated workflows. This period formed the backbone of what would later become a full platform.
The introduction of iOS and Android apps marked the beginning of a complete ecosystem: parent, student, staff, and foyer tools; automated reminders; deep AWS integration (a whole study on its own); and international compliance-first design.
In 2025, the entire platform was rebuilt using modern cloud-native frameworks with multi-region AWS hosting, mobile optimization, and clean UX. This wasn’t an upgrade — it was 12 months and a full re-engineering for the next decade.
Today, Boarding School Software has a stable multi-app ecosystem, strong compliance foundations, fast performance, and long-term scalability — ready for boarding schools anywhere in the world.
There are other established players in this space, all working to improve the lives of boarding staff, students and families. I respect the role each has played in lifting the digital standard across our industry. What sets Boarding School Software apart is simply that it grew from lived experience — decades inside boarding houses, years of classroom teaching, and long-term relationships with families and staff. It isn’t a startup trying to disrupt boarding. It’s the product of a lifetime spent inside it, built on the most modern software available, encompassing an encrypted state of art security regime that older code simply cannot employ, all supported by a committed development and succession team for the long term.
This blog traces how Boarding School Software grew from early spreadsheets and boarding tools into a fully rebuilt 2025 cloud platform supporting parents, students, staff, and boarding leaders. Built on decades of real boarding experience — from South Africa to Australia — the platform has evolved through multiple phases of development, incorporating AWS multi-region hosting, modern security practices, and a complete mobile ecosystem.
