IT Support for Schools and Academies

The DfE digital and technology standards

The Department for Education publishes digital and technology standards for schools and colleges, covering areas such as broadband, wireless networks, filtering and monitoring, cyber security, cloud solutions, servers and storage, and digital leadership. The DfE's stated ambition is for schools to meet the six core standards by 2030, and the Academy Trust Handbook asks trusts to work towards them.

Many schools sit between a local authority traded service, a trust central team and a handful of suppliers. We can audit where you stand against the cyber security, backup and Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace parts of the standards, and give your business manager and governors a plain list of what is in place, what is missing and what each fix costs. See our IT audit service.

RPA cyber cover conditions

Schools in the DfE's Risk Protection Arrangement get cyber cover only if they meet four conditions set out by the DfE:

• Offline backups of key data that follow NCSC guidance and are tested.
• NCSC cyber security training completed by all staff and governors with access to school IT.
• Registration with Police CyberAlarm, the free Home Office funded monitoring tool.
• A cyber response plan, starting from the RPA template.

We help with the technical parts. That means designing a backup that is genuinely separate from your network so ransomware cannot reach it, testing a restore and recording the result, and filling in the technical sections of your cyber response plan: who to call, how to isolate machines and where the backups live. Read more on data backup and recovery.

Filtering, monitoring and safeguarding

Keeping Children Safe in Education places a duty on schools to have appropriate filtering and monitoring, and the DfE filtering and monitoring standard expects schools to review it at least annually, with roles assigned to the designated safeguarding lead and a governor. The standard was updated to address generative AI.

Your filtering is usually supplied by your broadband or filtering provider. We help you check it is applied to every network and device, including staff laptops taken home, guest Wi-Fi and any secondary internet connection, and that monitoring alerts reach the right people. We can also record the checks so governors have evidence.

MIS, accounts and devices

Your MIS, whether Arbor, SIMS or Bromcom, holds the most sensitive data in the school. We enforce MFA for staff accounts in Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, remove leavers at the end of each term, and keep shared drives and Teams or Classroom permissions sensible. For laptops and tablets we can use Intune or Google admin to push updates and apps and wipe lost devices.

Where Wi-Fi struggles when thirty tablets connect at once, we look at access point placement, channel congestion and DHCP scope sizes. See our Wi-Fi support page.

Office staff are often the target rather than pupils. Finance and admin teams receive fake supplier invoices and payroll change requests. We set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC on the school domain, turn on external sender warnings and make sure the business manager's mailbox has MFA, because a compromised finance mailbox can be used to divert payments to suppliers or send convincing phishing to every parent on the mailing list.

Plans and costs for schools

Schools with an existing technician or trust IT team often use us for specific areas: the website on Essential at £25 a month + VAT or Business at £50 a month + VAT, or Microsoft 365 and office staff support on Complete at £99 a month + VAT, which includes 3 hours of work each month and a helpdesk.

Ad-hoc tasks are £45 an hour + VAT. Network refreshes, Wi-Fi surveys and on-site work are quoted. Ask us for a quote.

What it costs

Support plans from £25 a month + VAT, or £45 an hour + VAT for one-off fixes. Pick a plan if you want it looked after every month, or pay by the hour for a one-off job.

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