By Garry Jowett – Reach Director, Australia 
A common status that we experience within schools considering Reach is that the Student Life Management Team immediately identifies with the benefits that Reach provides and how it can greatly enhance their boarding operation; however, there is also a requirement to justify the cost and gain approval from the school business managers. To assist with this we have prepared this document to help quantify some of the tangible benefits that Reach will provide to your school.
We encourage all schools to assess Reach as an investment rather than simply as an operating cost because Reach will provide tangible and perpetual financial and management returns on this investment.
It is our firm belief that Reach will provide full cost recovery through reduced resourcing requirements and/or the reallocation of administrative labour alone.
We have set out below some of the areas where Reach will provide measurable benefits to your school.
Save several hours per week managing your school activities.
The most tangible and obvious gain from implementing Reach are the many hours that your student life or boarding staff will save in their weekly work routine. Reach delivers substantial efficiencies across all modules, reducing resource requirements and freeing up administrative hours which can be reallocated to other activities. Some examples of Reach efficiency gains you can expect are;
- Receive, approve, process, file and report student leave requests in an instant, on any device
- Eliminate time wasted following up on incomplete request forms
- Schedule automatic report generation and distribution to all relevant stakeholders
- Take a roll-call and file or report the data at any time, on any device and in an instant
- Know where all students are instantly with the Reach overview
Reach can save your school anything from 5-10 administrative hours per week. Even small schools of approx. 50 boarders are confirming a 5-hour per week time-saving in managing leave alone with the implementation of Reach.
What is the cost of your labour?
How might these hours be reallocated to other activities in your school?
How might Reach reduce your need to employ additional administrative resources?
Reduce wastage and better manage your school kitchen planning and costs.
Reach provides your school with accurate and real-time meal requirements for your students. Catering management can know in an instant the number of students that will be on campus for the next meal and the meal after that. In fact your catering management can easily access at any time the anticipated meal requirements for any meal into the future. They can also identify in an instant how many of those meals are restricted diet meals such as diabetic, gluten-free or vegetarian. With Reach scheduled reporting can distribute the weekend meal forecast to catering every Friday morning without anybody lifting a finger.
What is the catering budget for your school? What is a 5% saving worth, or perhaps even a 10% saving?
Manage and reduce risk in your boarding school.
Reach is a powerful risk management tool which provides your school with the systems, procedures, data records and rapid reporting capability to manage risk and more importantly to reduce your risk profile. Some examples where Reach provides risk management & reduction are;
- Instant knowledge of on/off campus numbers and their location on campus.
- The Reach Audit Trail provides a thorough tracking process for all activities of every individual, every communication and every transaction on the Reach system. This gives you rapid access to critical information in the instance of any incident.
- Transactions such as student leave cannot occur on Reach unless the correct procedures and/or approvals are followed. These procedures are set by you in your system configuration.
- Reach Pastoral Care and Medical Recordings assist student administrators to more effectively monitor and manage student behavioural and medical care
- Electronic check-in / check-out provides for accurate time and date stamping of student movements and features such as geo-fencing or GPS tracking provide even greater monitoring capabilities.
What is the price of Risk at your school?
Risk is intangible so it’s difficult to quantify but there is a value that your school places and a cost that your school faces for minimizing and managing risk.
Reach is a powerful and cost-effective tool which significantly improves risk management in the school.
Achieve continuous improvement and implement best practice in your boarding school
Reach is a powerful and flexible management tool which sets new benchmarks for best practices in Schools. Reach also provides your school with a pathway for continuous improvement through a program of regular system improvements, new technology adoption and drawing of best practices from many schools across the Globe to implement new operating features. You may use all of the modules available in Reach or elect to use only a few. Whichever you choose, Reach will improve your management systems with greater efficiency, improved control and knowledge, with rapid access to your management data.
Reach enables all schools, regardless of their size, to implement state-of-the-art systems and the capability to manage their business. In fact, Reach makes it possible and affordable for smaller schools to implement capabilities that many large schools are yet to implement.
The most cost-effective way to achieve continuous best practices is to share methods and development costs amongst your peers.
Reach achieves this, by drawing best practices from leading schools across the Globe and applying these into a powerful and flexible management tool for your school.
Improved parent & student experience
The benefits of Reach extend beyond schools and staff to include parents and students also. Reach provides a convenient and simple way for parents to manage their role at your school with access to information, forms and notifications on any device. Parents also benefit from the control systems and the instant notifications that Reach provides and this provides for enhanced communications with parents and an improved parent experience in their engagement with your geschool.
The time savings, improved communications and knowledge capability that Reach delivers are as potent and valuable for parents as it is for your school and staff. Reach is more than just a management tool for your school, it can also play a role as a marketing tool for your school with existing and prospective parents.
