Student Printing

[petben]

Hello, with budgets tightening we need to re-assess student printing, we currently give them (free) the equivalent of about 30 B&W pages, or a few colour copies a week (resetting every week), sounds a lot but it quickly gets used by art/graphis students and past exam paper printing etc. We want to change this to very limited printing, a payment system for students (ParentPay/Papercut) or even no printing!  😯

 

So the Q is how to you cater for student printing, how do you collect in money and credit their accounts? How do you deal with complaints they printed, it didn't print and 'can I get a refund' etc...a massive admin chore surely?

 

Thanks

 

 

[DrCheese]

We don't restrict students, beyond having per job limits to stop 10000 prints.

 

You're never going to be able to really chase students for payment, the answer will always be "Needed for lessons" - It's not worth the admin/staff time trying to keep on top of it all.

 

[ITGuyNW]

We give them £2 each at the start of every school year and anything after that is charged to departments for student printing in their lessons. Teachers soon crack the whip when they see their costs being depleted. 

[CHiLL]

We give them £2 at the start of year 7 and then they have to top up their print credit via us in IT. We are a small secondary school with approximately 650 students and a lot of content has moved online, so requests to credit accounts is surprisingly infrequent.

[chris11256]

We're a 6th form and all new year 12's are given £5 print credit. Once that runs out they topup via ParentPay which we then add to their Papercut account. Tends to be quiet most of the year, with peaks of credit being added in the runup to exams.

[msi_school]

I agree with @DrCheese every time I have worked somewhere with student print credits it has been constantly over ruled by staff saying Teaching and Learning, you need SLT buy in.

 

I do question the need to print out Past Papers, worksheets etc. Can't students can read these from the screen and complete the question on the computer or on a seperate sheet?

[DWilson1997]

Same as @DrCheese, we don't restrict student printing. 

[dhicks]

7 hours ago, petben said:

We want to change this to very limited printing, a payment system for students (ParentPay/Papercut) or even no printing!  😯

 

We don't allow any of our students (up to GCSE age) print directly, which (somewhat surprisingly) doesn't seem to be a problem. Anything that needs to be printed to be put up as a display or similar gets printed by the teacher (print quotas managed by PaperCut), but materials are mostly accessed online.

[NegativeKillDeath]

We have limits applied on a daily basis, 3 groups, KS3, KS4 and then art/photography students with sensible but low daily limits. Students can't print more than 2 copies of something and in addition we have print release portals set up on teachers PCs and they have to authorise the print jobs. This keeps a tight control over the silly wastage students could generate but the reality is student printing was a very small percentage of the total school printing.

[PureDarkStar]

IT will give students £2.50 per year, if they want more credit adding then they pay for an item on ParentPay and the finance team apply the credit manually. But TBH, it's only really our GCSE/A-Level Art students that buy more credit.

[PotNoodleTech]

We do't restrict it, but we do log it into a KS3, KS4 and KS5 departments so we have a rough idea what various key stages are using and can spot any sillyness.

 

Also - they can only print when they are in IT suites - not from their chromebooks.

[mbedford]

19 hours ago, msi_school said:

I agree with @DrCheese every time I have worked somewhere with student print credits it has been constantly over ruled by staff saying Teaching and Learning, you need SLT buy in.

 

I do question the need to print out Past Papers, worksheets etc. Can't students can read these from the screen and complete the question on the computer or on a seperate sheet?

We give every student £5 every term.  They can add more as they require via visiting our Library and either doing a card or cash transaction (FE College here).  Very rarely do we get the problem mentioned above.

 

I will be honest, as the budget holder for printing costs, I never say no to a student who has run out of credit and needs to print something.  If my organisation cant afford for a student from a not well off background to print off a few pages of paper, we are doing something very, very wrong.