IT Support for Schools

Hundreds of users, and not one of them is an employee

A school is the hardest small network there is. Not the biggest — the hardest. A two-form primary can have more connected devices than a fifty-person office: a trolley of tablets per key stage, an ICT suite, a display in every classroom, staff laptops, office PCs and printers. The office has an IT budget and someone who owns it. The school has a part-time technician, a teacher with an interest, or a provider booked for a few days a month.

Then comes the part that makes this genuinely different from business IT. In an office, every user has signed a contract and has something to lose. In a school, most of your users are children. They will find whatever the filter misses, usually within a week of it missing it. They will share passwords as a favour. They will discover that the display pen works as a lever. None of that is misbehaviour to be designed around later. It is the starting condition, and it should shape what you buy and how you set it up on day one.

Design follows the users

That is why access by year group matters more in a school than department permissions do in a business: what a Year 2 pupil should reach is not what a Year 6 pupil should reach, and neither is what a teacher should reach. It is why devices go into management the moment they are unboxed, so a tablet that comes back with a new home screen and three unknown apps can be reset to a known state in minutes. And it is why wireless coverage is a load problem here rather than a coverage problem — thirty tablets waking in one room at 9:05 is a very different demand curve from thirty office laptops drifting online across a morning.

Hardware choice follows too. Kit carried by an eight-year-old and charged by whoever is nearest should be picked for survivability, not for a spec sheet, and deploying devices at school scale is mostly logistics: enrolment, labelling, distribution and an accurate record of which device lives in which room.

Filtering and monitoring is a duty, not a preference

Schools in England are expected to have appropriate filtering and monitoring in place. That expectation sits under safeguarding, and Keeping Children Safe in Education is the statutory guidance schools work to, with the Prevent duty alongside it. It is not a product you buy once but a set of decisions — what is blocked, for whom, who sees the alerts, how fast they are acted on, and who reviews the arrangement — and those decisions belong to the school, not to an IT supplier.

Our half is technical. We keep the filtering and monitoring you have chosen working on every device and every route out to the internet, including the ones that get forgotten: a guest network, a phone on the staff Wi-Fi, a laptop taken home. We make sure alerts land with a person. We do not write your online safety policy and we do not give safeguarding advice — buying IT support does not discharge a safeguarding duty.

The MIS is the school’s spine

Attendance, assessment, contact details, medical notes and safeguarding records all live in the management information system. SIMS, Arbor and Bromcom are examples of that category, and which one a school runs is the school’s decision.

Whichever it is, it stands on identity, the network, the devices and the backup — and almost every fault that stops a school using its MIS at 8:30am sits in that layer, not in the software. Nobody can sign in because a password policy expired overnight. The line to the office is down. The one machine the census gets run from has not been updated since July. The sector has shifted steadily away from MIS hosted on a server in a cupboard and towards cloud-hosted MIS, which moves the risk rather than removing it: your internet connection and your accounts become the thing everything else waits on.

August, or next August

Two constraints shape every school IT project. The budget is set annually and committed early — maintained schools and academy trusts do not even share the same financial year — so work that misses its window does not slip a fortnight, it slips a year. And disruptive work happens in the holidays, because you cannot recable a corridor or re-image three hundred devices around a timetable.

So planning runs backwards from the summer: price the work in the autumn, replace devices in planned cohorts instead of emergencies, keep a written picture of what you own and how old it is, and separate what must happen this year from what can wait. Cyber Essentials is a useful anchor for that conversation: it is a government-backed scheme, the controls are worth having anyway, and it gives governors something concrete to approve.

The systems parents see

Payments and parent communications carry their own kind of pressure — ParentPay is one well-known example of the category. When a parent-facing system fails, a school does not get a quiet hour to investigate. It gets a full inbox, because several hundred families meet the same problem at once. Most of the platform is out of your hands, so the useful work sits at the edges: accurate contact data at source, a known route to the supplier, and a second way to reach parents when the first is down.

Children’s data, handled properly

Schools hold pupil records, medical information and safeguarding notes about children. Little is more sensitive. The controls that matter are unglamorous: access by role rather than by seniority; multi-factor sign-in on staff accounts; encrypted laptops, because the ones that leave the building are the ones that go missing; backups that have been restored from rather than assumed to work; and a real offboarding routine, since schools cycle through supply teachers, trainees, volunteers and governors faster than a business of the same size — our leaver checklist covers the steps that get skipped.

Most support work is remote, which suits a school day. When something needs hands on it — a cabinet, a cable run, a classroom display, a holiday rollout — we come out across South London, Croydon and into Surrey, which is the patch the schools that find us tend to sit in — from Croydon and Purley down to Banstead. Much of that work is delivered by our sister company PC Macgicians. If something on this page sounds familiar, get in touch.