How do your (primary) pupils save files? Where and how?

[tooplanx]

Hi all. We have a nightmare trying to save files at school. Nothing seems to work properly and be easy enough for pupils to be able to reliably save work.

 

So, how exactly do pupils save work at your school?

 

For context, we have multiple possible options in our school: 

• We have a student shared drive on the server
• We have Sharepoint / one drive with sso for the pupils
• We have MS Teams

 

The problem is that none of these seem to work in a suitable way:

 

First off, Teams just doesn't work. multiple errors, not loading, needing updates etc. etc.

 

Second, pupils can't access sharepoint drives. Sites is in office, but there are no folders viewable / accessible.

 

Third - Student network drive - the best option at the moment, however it takes about 20 steps for the pupils to get to the folder to save things in. Getting 30 kids under 8yo to successfully go through these 20 steps is nigh on impossible.

 

What easy method do your schools use? We need to be able to save office projects, scratch projects, 'paint' projects online (e.g. downloaded files), audio projects etc etc.

 

Thanks!

[psydii]

can't speak to primary specifically, but hopefully some of this will help:

 

"just save in the user's OneDrive" is the default behaviour of office apps.  If the user is a member of a small umber of SharePoint sites, these will appear as optional locations to save in the standard save dialogue boxes. (that bit gets messy when people are members of a lot, but infrequent users of computers, but primary kids probably just need to be a member of one site, that of their class)

Properly configured OneDrive client signs in automatically and the users documents etc folders are redirected into it - so any non-365 App that has a traditional file-save mechanism should be well catered for by just saving into the user's documents folder.

 

Whether you need some policies in place to manage local disk space is a function of the size of the school and the age of the computers. But we get away with 256gb disks in many locations with 1800+ users.

 

[tooplanx]

3 hours ago, psydii said:

"just save in the user's OneDrive" is the default behaviour of office apps.  If the user is a member of a small umber of SharePoint sites, these will appear as optional locations to save in the standard save dialogue boxes. 

Properly configured OneDrive client signs in automatically and the users documents etc folders are redirected into it - so any non-365 App that has a traditional file-save mechanism should be well catered for by just saving into the user's documents folder.

Thanks for the reply. The issue is that teachers need to be able to easily access the saved files themselves. As I understand it, if the file is saved in the pupil's own OneDrive folder it isn't accessible by anyone other than the child.

 

Is this correct? Is there a way around this?

[badgerbadger]

Old-school method of a Pupil Shared drive, mapped as 'P' is the tried and tested method.

It's a free-for-all for students and teachers alike.

Staff should set a folder per intake with Year Of Leaving (easier than Y1, Y2, etc, or Year of Intake I find)

In that folder, each kid has their own which travels with them through their time at school.

 

So, Computer | P drive | 2026 | Bob Cheese | Y6 | files

 

I guess their Home drive mapped through GPO works too but then the staff need to navigate to multiple home folders and that's a faff they won't want to do.

[Jayellcee]

"Old-school method of a Pupil Shared drive, mapped as 'P' is the tried and tested method."

 

Same here

The children have a simple link on their desktop to the shared area

[psydii]

Depending on the size of school and the availability of your Global Administrator, there are two options

 

1) If you are a small site and don't have any 3rd party automation in place to create users etc, then use a powershell script to grant your "all teachers" group read-only access to each student's onedrive.

 

2) If you do have automation (e.g. Salamander) have that set permissions on student onedrives so the form tutor has read-only access to each student's onedrive.

 

If you want a centralised approach, and you have automation, you might have the automation provision each student a folder in a shareopint site with appropriate permissions, and then create a link to that folder, placing it in the Desktop folder in each student's Onedrive.  They could then navigate to it in the usual (Windows File Explorer) way in non 365-aware applications, and OneDrive->Desktop->StudentFolder in  365 Apps.

 

Based on how I understand primary's to work, I would suggest option 2 and the centralised approach, so if a student saves it somewhere else the teacher can still find it.

[tooplanx]

On 21/10/2025 at 20:58, badgerbadger said:

Old-school method of a Pupil Shared drive, mapped as 'P' is the tried and tested method.

It's a free-for-all for students and teachers alike.

Staff should set a folder per intake with Year Of Leaving (easier than Y1, Y2, etc, or Year of Intake I find)

In that folder, each kid has their own which travels with them through their time at school.

 

So, Computer | P drive | 2026 | Bob Cheese | Y6 | files

 

I guess their Home drive mapped through GPO works too but then the staff need to navigate to multiple home folders and that's a faff they won't want to do.

 

We have separate class folders on the StudentShared drive, which is the best option we have found. We (I) had hoped that we would be able to move over to an integrated Onedrive/Sharepoint/Teams, as the plan was to completely get rid of the onsite server. However, that seems like it just doesn't work that well yet.

 

So, using the StudentShared drive seem the best option like you say.

 

The issue we have with that is that the StudentShared drive takes several jumps to get to:

 

Navigate to 'This PC'

Expand This PC

Scroll to bottom of window to 'Shared' drive and double click

Select StudentShared folder

Navigate to their class folder and any subfolders required.

 

This may not seem like much, but only about 80% of the class will successfully complete each step without 1:1 support, so the likelihood of getting to the end is low!

 

I would like the Student Shared folder, or the network class folders pinned to Quick Access, but our IT department says that's not possible!

[psydii]

If you are going to stick with on-prem servers, It might be better for IT to create a folder for teachers that contain "junction points" to each student's redirected Documents folder.

That way the kids just save in Documents, and the teachers can jump into them using a directory that contains only their class.

 

If you don't want on prem, then let windows do its thing with onedrive (by default Documents is redirected into OneDrive, so the default save location is OneDrive), and have IT create links to the student onedrives.  The teachers can then "sync" their student's onedrive to their computers for easy accesss through File Explorer.

 

Either way the path to save work is File Explorer -~> Documents for the kids, and File Explorer - SOMEFOLDER - Student Username for staff.

[tooplanx]

3 hours ago, psydii said:

If you are going to stick with on-prem servers, It might be better for IT to create a folder for teachers that contain "junction points" to each student's redirected Documents folder.

That way the kids just save in Documents, and the teachers can jump into them using a directory that contains only their class.

 

If you don't want on prem, then let windows do its thing with onedrive (by default Documents is redirected into OneDrive, so the default save location is OneDrive), and have IT create links to the student onedrives.  The teachers can then "sync" their student's onedrive to their computers for easy accesss through File Explorer.

 

Either way the path to save work is File Explorer -~> Documents for the kids, and File Explorer - SOMEFOLDER - Student Username for staff.

I like the sound of the first option. I will try to get our IT support to make that happen! So there is a teacher accessible class folder on the server that then has shortcuts (junction points) to each of the pupils' Documents folders? So it's possible to access pupil 'personal' documents folders somehow? They currently sync with OneDrive, but I thought they were otherwise saved locally to the laptop they are using. Or do you have to create junction points so their individual Documents folders redirect to folders on the server?

 

Thanks!

[psydii]

If they sync with OneDrive, you'll need to

Quote

let windows do its thing with onedrive (by default Documents is redirected into OneDrive, so the default save location is OneDrive), and have IT create links to the student onedrives.  The teachers can then "sync" their student's onedrive to their computers for easy accesss through File Explorer.

 

 On-prem really is going away, so building a solution around it in 2025 is, unfortunately the wrong thing to do.

Some bits of the scripts on this page might help your IT team automate the bit of the process where the the teacher needs to sync the student OneDrives to their computer.

Synchronizing SharePoint Document Libraries with OneDrive using PnP PowerShell - Rishan Solutions

(I've not tried it, and OneDrive is a special case of a SharePoint Document Library so has its own quirks when doing this sort of thing, and I'm not sure why pnp would be needed when sites and document library urls are predictable) YMMV

 

Students will then save files at the following path (for trad Windows Apps) File Explorer -~> Documents

For staff it will be File Explorer -> School Name ->"Documents - Student Name"

On the web students just save to the default location and 365 does the rest. For teachers they will be able to use the 365 landing page to discover the the OneDrives, but also IT could just provide an excel file with links.

 

The tricky bit is if five clicks deep is too complex for 20% of the students, you are in a hole. Perhaps expecting them to produce work that needs to be reviewed by their teacher in a file/folder structure is the problem. In my opinion it is certainly something they ought to be able to do by the end of Year 6.  However,  even ten years ago  I heard teachers who'd moved from primary to secondary teaching lamenting the collapse of basic ICT skills in students arriving at secondary compared to those from previous cohorts. The issue may be systemic.

 

 

[tooplanx]

19 hours ago, psydii said:

 

 

The tricky bit is if five clicks deep is too complex for 20% of the students, you are in a hole. Perhaps expecting them to produce work that needs to be reviewed by their teacher in a file/folder structure is the problem. In my opinion it is certainly something they ought to be able to do by the end of Year 6.  However,  even ten years ago  I heard teachers who'd moved from primary to secondary teaching lamenting the collapse of basic ICT skills in students arriving at secondary compared to those from previous cohorts. The issue may be systemic.

 

 

Thanks for this.

 

Yeah, by the end of Y4 or even Y3, I'd expect them to be able to navigate the file browser reasonably well and many can, but there are always many pupils who struggle (mainly just following instructions).

 

In KS1 it is very difficult for them and so they come up to LKS2 without even being able to login to their computers without adult support. I teach Y3, so I have the battle of trying to get them from pretty much 0 up to a reasonably proficient state, all with limited time, trying to fulfil the curriculum, teach them the basic skills, and get evidence of work! Fun times.

 

I think if the basics of saving were much easier for the kids, it would encourage the teachers to get the kids on the laptops more (that's what I'm pushing for), but when the simple task of saving something or sharing a file is a nightmare, teachers are understandably reluctant.

[psydii]

I wonder if it's the "application first" trend that has been prevalent since the original Google Drive and IOS Apps? These (it seems to me) created mental models that make conceptualising the actual underlying filing system more difficult than necessary. Basically people are being taught wrong (by the UX from Google and Apple), and the second they need their work to interact with the work of others the simple model breaks and they have to learn how to use a filing system - fine in highly motivated adults with peers who know how to do it properly, far less fine in schools where suddenly the English teacher is having to teach basic IT skills.

 

IT Support: "Where did you save it?" 

User:  "In Word"

IT Support: **screams into the void in my soul**

 

Maybe in KS1 the need to start* with, "here is your folder where you keep your work." "Here is the menu that lets you create new work in this folder."*DO WORK*, "look see how that work you did is saved in your folder?"...  and then using that pattern every lesson, building all additional skills from there, while not worring about the teacher being able to easily get to the work until later. Then perhaps only adding the more complex "well sometimes we need to work together, so here is a folder where you can do that. Let's start a new document in this shared folder"  in Year 3, when they arelady have the concepts of a hierarchical filing systems embedded.

 

(By "start" I mean, at the point where the curriculum calls for them to engage with creating files, not necessarily lesson 1 of Year 1!)

 

Consider how kids have different exercise books for each subject, and how they are issued the books, how they are collected and managed. They are taught how to use them and how to manage them, and the expectations upon the students develops as they progress. But crucially (as far as I can tell as a parent, I don't have professional experience of a Primary Setting), from Yr1 they stop working on scraps of paper and move to the exercise book model, learning to organise their work start *very* early. If core IT skills aren't being taught along a similar developmental pathway, perhaps that is what needs to be re-evaluated before accepting that problem as the defining parameters  for a technological solution.