Is it possible to prevent students from emailing staff on our Google Apps domain?

[MarcLister]

We have a Google Apps domain for our school. All our students and staff have an email address on the domain but are in separate organisational units. We are having problems with students emailing staff out of hours and staff, rightly so, want their own time to be free from interruption by student emails.

 

Is it possible to prevent students, or users in one OU, from emailing staff/users in another OU? The requirement has been given to me to make this out of hours, i.e. between 3pm and 8.30am weekdays and then from 2.30pm on Fridays until 8.30am on Monday. However scheduling in half-terms and holidays etc makes me think that it would be easier, if it is at all possible in the first place, to just prevent students from being able to email staff at all, at any time.

 

So, can this be done? If not, I'm considering setting up another Google Apps domain and splitting the students and staff up so that we can then prevent staff from getting emails from the 'external' student domain by blacklisting it. That might be a severe option though.

[fiza]

We have a Google Apps domain for our school. All our students and staff have an email address on the domain but are in separate organisational units. We are having problems with students emailing staff out of hours and staff, rightly so, want their own time to be free from interruption by student emails.

Sorry but how is this disturbing the staff? Its not like students are phoning them at all hours. Dont want to be disturbed dont check your school emails after hours!

[TwistedHelixis]

I seem to remember someone saying they had created a subdomain in the G Suite admin console under 'DOMAINS' and then used that for the pupils, which created separate global emails etc. I have not done this so don't hold me to it.

 

EDITED

[nadeem]

Sorry but how is this disturbing the staff? Its not like students are phoning them at all hours. Dont want to be disturbed dont check your school emails after hours!

 

This ^^^

[nadeem]

So, can this be done? If not, I'm considering setting up another Google Apps domain and splitting the students and staff up so that we can then prevent staff from getting emails from the 'external' student domain by blacklisting it. That might be a severe option though.

 

I would get SLT approval before you even consider doing this - what possible reason would you have to do this

[MarcLister]

Sorry but how is this disturbing the staff? Its not like students are phoning them at all hours. Dont want to be disturbed dont check your school emails after hours!

 

I would get SLT approval before you even consider doing this - what possible reason would you have to do this

The issue is the content of the emails. Staff are getting emails from students with distressing content. Most staff have Gmail on their phones and so get emails at all times.

 

It is a member of SLT who has asked me to look into the out-of-hours issue but I don't think I can do that hence my suggestion to my colleague in SLT that we might have to separate students into another domain.

[fiza]

The whole point of G Suite is collaboration and student/teacher communications. It's more of a discipline/behaviour issue if they are sending inappropriate emails. Make an example of a couple of the students that did it and the rest will fall in line. There are settings in G Suite Admin Console that you can set to block & quarantine emails that contain inappropriate language.

[MkII]

How about Quiet for Gmail? Teachers set times that they don't want to be disturbed:

 

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sgarcia.quiet_for_gmail&hl=en_US

Edited November 30, 2018 by MkII

[elsiegee40]

The issue is the content of the emails. Staff are getting emails from students with distressing content. Most staff have Gmail on their phones and so get emails at all times.

 

It is a member of SLT who has asked me to look into the out-of-hours issue but I don't think I can do that hence my suggestion to my colleague in SLT that we might have to separate students into another domain.

If there's distressing content then it's either a pupil disciplinary issue (everything from removing email from that child to permanent exclusion) or it's a Safeguarding problem that needs dealing with urgently.

 

It's not an IT department problem

[jthompson]

In terms of the technical side of it, blocking delivery from student addresses could be done easily if your account naming convention is conducive to being able to match student accounts easily (for instance, if all student addresses start with a number but staff only start with letters).

 

The bit you'd have real difficulty with is the scheduling. There's nothing in the G Suite admin console to support that.

 

Like others have said, I'd urge you to resist any ideas about email being anything other than a 24/7 service, if only to discourage people hopping onto private accounts to send their messages instead.

[MarcLister]

The whole point of G Suite is collaboration and student/teacher communications. It's more of a discipline/behaviour issue if they are sending inappropriate emails. Make an example of a couple of the students that did it and the rest will fall in line. There are settings in G Suite Admin Console that you can set to block & quarantine emails that contain inappropriate language.

I agree. It's something I don't think I can do. However as a special needs school disciplining students won't necessarily work. Our DSL doesn't want to prevent students from emailing staff and would prefer that we tell our students to email him (on a specially created email address not his own work address) out of hours as he has responsibility 24/7.

 

How about Quiet for Gmail? Teachers set times that they don't want to be disturbed:

 

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sgarcia.quiet_for_gmail&hl=en_US

Thanks. Just what I need! If staff open up a computer or laptop at home out of hours and pick up a work email then that's their own issue. If they get emails coming through to their phones, how do they know it's a work email or a private email? This might just save me a lot of work.

 

If there's distressing content then it's either a pupil disciplinary issue (everything from removing email from that child to permanent exclusion) or it's a Safeguarding problem that needs dealing with urgently.

 

It's not an IT department problem

As said above, with special needs students, we wouldn't want to discipline students. We'd rather educate them to email a particular email address out of hours so that our DSL can sort issues out and involve other members of SLT if appropriate.

 

In terms of the technical side of it, blocking delivery from student addresses could be done easily if your account naming convention is conducive to being able to match student accounts easily (for instance, if all student addresses start with a number but staff only start with letters).

 

The bit you'd have real difficulty with is the scheduling. There's nothing in the G Suite admin console to support that.

 

Like others have said, I'd urge you to resist any ideas about email being anything other than a 24/7 service, if only to discourage people hopping onto private accounts to send their messages instead.

Exactly. I was thinking that as students know how the staff email addresses are formulated, sectioning students off into another domain wouldn't work as the students could still email staff. I would be very reluctant to block ALL student emails from a new domain to our staff domain as, as has been said, it would be a 24/7 block and I don't want that.

[snagrat]

Not ideal but could you use GAM to enable/disable the rule that blocks the emails?

 

Then have a schedule task that runs at the correct time to run GAM and enable/disable the rule.

[junz]

How would you go about doing that?

[elsiegee40]

I agree. It's something I don't think I can do. However as a special needs school disciplining students won't necessarily work. Our DSL doesn't want to prevent students from emailing staff and would prefer that we tell our students to email him (on a specially created email address not his own work address) out of hours as he has responsibility 24/7.##

 

Thanks. Just what I need! If staff open up a computer or laptop at home out of hours and pick up a work email then that's their own issue. If they get emails coming through to their phones, how do they know it's a work email or a private email? This might just save me a lot of work.

 

As said above, with special needs students, we wouldn't want to discipline students. We'd rather educate them to email a particular email address out of hours so that our DSL can sort issues out and involve other members of SLT if appropriate.

 

Exactly. I was thinking that as students know how the staff email addresses are formulated, sectioning students off into another domain wouldn't work as the students could still email staff. I would be very reluctant to block ALL student emails from a new domain to our staff domain as, as has been said, it would be a 24/7 block and I don't want that.

 

I am kind of troubled that a child who needs to disclose out of hours could only do it to one email address. There may be a very distinct reason that a particular reason that the child has chosen to tell a particular staff member and doesn't feel they can talk to another. Yes, the DSL will inevitably get involved later, but that may not be the person the child feels they can 'talk' to.

 

If a child feels they're only allowed to tell one particular person then they may not disclose at all which is potentially far worse.

 

I am sorry your staff feel upset about some of these disclosures, but they work in a school and these things happen. They undoubtedly happen more frequently in special schools than in mainstream, but that's not the point.

 

@GrumbleDook is there anything OP's school needs to watch out for wih regard to duty of care and the proposed solution?