School Mobile Phone

[Homer]

Morning all

 

A quick question - do you guys supply paygo phones to any teachers going off site with students, or do you have a basic contract in place?

 

I'm thinking paygo will be best value for money, but want others opinions too... it will be used in other EU countries as well

 

Cheers

[Steve21]

We had contract phones are my old place. SLT/IT/SITE/TRIPS, and added EU data bundles as and when required

 

You'll soon get asked to add things like options to upload pictures, do registers etc

 

Steve

[Sagima]

We have a few phones on sim only contract for offsite use but most teachers above a certain level have a school phone anyway and there are usually at least one of those with offsite groups of students and all out-of-country staff are lent one.

[Sibrows]

We had contract phones are my old place. SLT/IT/SITE/TRIPS

 

Very similar here.

[beany1]

When we looked into pricing, Orange (whatever they're called now) and Three (which we chose) offered us great SIM only contracts that include a lot of minutes / texts and data

[SchoolsBroadband]

Hi folks,

 

I'm not sure if you are aware but we have a specialist wholesale mobile division which is part of the Talk Straight Group.

 

We've one particular tariff that gives unlimited minutes, unlimited sms text, 5Gig of data for £20 a month and is on a rolling 30 day contract.

 

We do all the billing and support and just add it onto your monthly bill from us.

 

PM me if its of interest.

 

Ta

 

Dave

[bclarke]

Take a look at O2's offering of their Number 10 tariff which has been negotiated for schools. Excellent value for money.

[jdoyle]

We had contract phones are my old place. SLT/IT/SITE/TRIPS, and added EU data bundles as and when required

 

You'll soon get asked to add things like options to upload pictures, do registers etc

 

Steve

 

e.g. put the WordPress app on so that the school trip blogs to Germany, France and Pencelli could be updated by staff directly. That one worked reasonably well.

 

Never understood why the Site staff never had a phone with camera to help document issues around the school e.g. on school closure days.

 

Main driver originally seemed to be SLT feathering own nest; ICT to a point too.

[Oaktech]

we have 5 Nokia 105 bricks topped up with £10 of EE credit, with the account set up to be able to add more remotely. They go out with staff as we have a weekly trip to swimming and a PE elite group that go to a local football club to train.

 

We also have 4 contract samsung smartphones that have a shared data allowance, unlimited minutes and unlimited texts, also on EE. these belong to the executive head, head, BM and site manager and are for emergency contact in the event of an incident.

 

EE are the carrier with the widest reach in this area.

[john]

We had some pool phones for school trips and site team had phones, they were through the public sector EE framework agreement so only cost us a few quid a month for basic packages and were fine for that job.

[truebluesteve]

We have 3 basic Nokia phones which are bookable on our resources/room booking system which staff can use for trip. They are all on a contract as we found remembering to top them up was becoming a pain.

[rad]

Whatever phone you get, get something easy to use and holds charge. Sad as it is but the cheap Nokias fill this gap well. We have a school phone that is a Blackberry, worst thing ever, I only wanted to dial a number but the full qwerty keyboard hinders that

[MatthewL]

The Nokia 109's are ideal, even if you get sim only deals you can pick the handsets up for less than £20 in Tesco sim free. Unless they need data these are perfect and batteries last for ages.

[robk]

We have some Orange/EE sim cards. £5 per card, much lower cost per min than PAYG. No data though.

[Iain.Faulkner]

We've got 9 or 10 pay as you go phones that are used for trips/offsite visits etc. Staff book them out as required, we check balance before and after the trip and then charge the amount used to the trip/department (at least in theory). Phones are very basic, calls and texts only.

 

Staff of a certain level have school phones on contract.