Anyone rolled out a parental purchase scheme for hardware?

[fiza]

We are thinking about introducing a parental purchase scheme so that our parents can buy IT kit for their children in 6th form (limiting it to Chromebook, Windows laptop or Macbook). Currently speaking to one company but can anyone recommend a company from their own experience?

 

If you have rolled a similar scheme out what has been the take up from parents?

[Sylv3r]

We used Stone and the offering worked well and all the admin was carried out for us, it was a nightmare with parents stopped paying once signed up to the scheme aka theft !

 

Everything was covered with the gap insurance etc, so the school wasn't out of pocket it just didn't feel right personally, so i've decided not to do it this year.

[junz]

We are thinking about introducing a parental purchase scheme so that our parents can buy IT kit for their children in 6th form (limiting it to Chromebook, Windows laptop or Macbook). Currently speaking to one company but can anyone recommend a company from their own experience?

 

If you have rolled a similar scheme out what has been the take up from parents?

We have use Burnetts which most companies who offer this type of scheme go through anyway.They just market it in their own way. Another company to consider is Freedom tech https://freedomtech.co.uk/ which basically do the same thing but I believe have lesser restrictions when making GAP claims(Don`t need a police reference number). We had all our parents purchase a device but this is because the school decided to move to Gsuite etc so it was basically needed. In order to have this uptake we brought in parents after school to explain the scheme and why we were doing this any answered any questions they had which I belive helped uptake.

 

It works well however there are definitely things to consider:

• When we set this scheme up we had to finance the equipment from a bank called Syscap (Now weslyn bank) and pay them a monthly rental which we are still paying. This amount is contributed to by parents .At the end of the agreement you have to make a one off payment to transfer title of the goods. W have two agreements one of which expires this year and we need to pay £4000 to transfer the title to the achool or send the Chromebooks back(No way we can do that)
  
• Will you allow parents to pay monthly or will it just be a one off payment. If monthly definitely consider getting GAP issuance so that if parents do not pay or their son leaves the school the cost of the device is covered.
  
• Will you offer accidental damage insurance/extended warranty for the device if so price will be slightly increased however with Burnetts you get 3 accidental damages claims in a year per year.
  
• If you offer monthly contributions and parents fail to keep up with payments after two or three attempts of collections by Burnetts the school will need to chase parents/send out letters- is this something you are willing to do?
  

We offered the above scheme however some parents fell on financial hard times and were not able to keep up with the monthly payments which meant that the school had to cover the cost as we did not want to take the device of the child(which we would have to do to claim the GAP insurance unless the child had left the school) so definitely something to consider.

 

We will not be continuing with the scheme as it cost a lot more in the end then we thought and now parents either rent a device from the school or purchase a device outright form the school. My advice would be to make sure you read the agreement properly and understand what you are getting into. I know this is a lot so happy to talk though it with you if you would like.

Edited April 9, 2019 by junz

[fiza]

Anyone else have any recommendations please?

[NetworkServices]

Not something I could recommend. Once the warranties expire and the company no longer wants to know you'll likely find that the next port of call for the parents is the school. You could end up getting married to all of this kit. A similar thing happened when we rolled out a laptop purchase scheme. Three years later and we were suddenly expected to pick up the support long after the warranty period had ended. Of course the school not wanting to pee off the parents who bought this kit agreed to this.

[gumbygaz]

We've had a Chromebook scheme for the 6th form run for the past 4 years, Stone winning the deal the last couple years. They use a company called Freedom tech, who deal with all the payment chasing etc. We get about 90% buy in, those who don't buy can borrow a device from the library during the school hours.

The chromebooks (Acer 14 FHD) scheme we do is over 12months - paid in 10 installments though due to Year 12 not getting officially offered a place until a set date and they could leave at the end of year 12 so want to ensure we've had the money before they leave.

 

Works out around the £30pm - £360 (they can pay all upfront for a discount too) - includes Case, Google Admin Licence, Insurance, Warranty for a year. Which is fine, but when in Year 13 we have pursuade them to insure or claim under house insurance. Not ideal, but this year we're able to offer 3years for no additional costs so will make that much better.

 

We get the odd grumble from Parents saying they can get them cheaper from Amazon etc. I wouldn't mind them buying a Chromebook themselves as long as they agree for us to put the management licence on to push out settings etc, we remove them once they finish at the school, but SLT would rather everyone has the same device etc and as said before we get such a high buy in it seems to work.

[SuperChris1980]

Hi Fiza I can help you with this, here at Stone we do this for numerous customers and there is no admin for you Edited May 29, 2019 by elsiegee40
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[fiza]

I know this is an old thread but as I started it and we are now back to looking at a 1:1 scheme I wanted to ask a few more questions for those that run schemes like this.

 

We are considering offering this to Y7 and wanted to know;

 

What do students do with the devices when not in use? ie break and lunchtimes?

How did you deal with parents who were anxious about safety of their child carrying a device to and from school? To me the kids probably have a smart phone that is much more expensive than any Chromebook they may be carrying!

[Bev]

I know this is an old thread but as I started it and we are now back to looking at a 1:1 scheme I wanted to ask a few more questions for those that run schemes like this.

 

We are considering offering this to Y7 and wanted to know;

 

What do students do with the devices when not in use? ie break and lunchtimes?

How did you deal with parents who were anxious about safety of their child carrying a device to and from school? To me the kids probably have a smart phone that is much more expensive than any Chromebook they may be carrying!

 

We have 1-1 iPad scheme. Normally our pupils have lockers that they can leave their iPad in, however, with Covid the lockers are currently out of use. They keep their iPads in their bags along with all their other stuff.

We haven't really had any issues with parents being anxious about carrying the device, we have been doing it for 5 years now and it's so commonplace within our school that it's a non-issue. we can track the iPads if they get left places (assuming they are on the Wifi, iPads left in the park are quite hard to track!)

 

We used to use Burnetts as mentioned above but we weren't very happy with them, and now use a company called CPU for the insurance and payment collection. The iPads were all provided by Jigsaw24.