misources Posted February 1, 2012 Author Posted February 1, 2012 To give you a couple of comparisons of what other schools pay. I look after 2 schools, 1 is a middle school and they pay about £5k for a 100Mbit connection, which includes filtering, student email, video conferencing, support, connection into the local authority for easy access to their services and other services. The other school is actually 4 schools in one building, this comes to around £13k for a 100Mbit connection with filtering, video conferencing access, easy access to local authority services and similar. If it were a single school in the building, it would be around £6k. How rural is your area and that school in particular? This is really interesting and helps me realise how far out of line our costs are. The school is not rural at all, well built-up area with good connections. I'll start to shop around for the school now I've had all this great feedback.
localzuk Posted February 1, 2012 Posted February 1, 2012 Thanks Glennda - my only experience is with google apps, which has an extensive management panel that was of course developed for large corporations, who already trust them to run their service, like General Motors who I think have 100,000 users on or something. You can easily manage large groups of student i.d.'s and manage access, rights etc. Interesting you are running 2,000 mailboxes on exchange, that would cost a fortune compared to google apps when you factor in hardware investment, replacement, support, patching, back-up etc etc? Google Apps is not a panacea for school email. We have it at our school and there are some significant issues surrounding filtering and control. For example, an incident occurred where a pupils email account was used to send an offensive email to every other person on our account. What options do we have for finding which machine logged in to do this and when? As we use a proxy, none. How do we get rid of that email for all recipients? The only way would be to reset every account password and log in and remove it manually. Not a small task for 1200 accounts. If we had our own exchange server, we could find which machine did what, when and how. We could recall emails or do a search across all mailboxes and delete the emails centrally. So, there are real issues at the moment.
glennda Posted February 1, 2012 Posted February 1, 2012 Thanks Glennda - my only experience is with google apps, which has an extensive management panel that was of course developed for large corporations, who already trust them to run their service, like General Motors who I think have 100,000 users on or something. You can easily manage large groups of student i.d.'s and manage access, rights etc. Interesting you are running 2,000 mailboxes on exchange, that would cost a fortune compared to google apps when you factor in hardware investment, replacement, support, patching, back-up etc etc? Yes but Google Apps is fairly new in terms of the wider picture and still has its problems in the edu world. Exchange Costs us under 2 x £50pa for license (can't remember exact figure). Then runs as a VM as part of a wider Virtual System - each machine as 12Gb ram and 4 Cores factoring hardware costs is difficult as its part of a wider solution but overall san/servers cost circa 25k but this runs 80% of the network and exchange is probably a 5/10% chunk. All the support is done by the team (2 1/2 people). So probably around 3/4k over 4 years for hardware/software
plexer Posted February 1, 2012 Posted February 1, 2012 This is really interesting and helps me realise how far out of line our costs are. The school is not rural at all, well built-up area with good connections. I'll start to shop around for the school now I've had all this great feedback. Not sure if you posted but is it primary or secondary? Does the school employ any it support staff? If so have you discussed these issues with them? Whilst you have input as a governor I would suggest that it's not your place to be shopping around. You will also find there is a contract period, possible early termination fees also. Ben
misources Posted February 1, 2012 Author Posted February 1, 2012 @misources I don't think I have too. They are all getting regurgitated here, once again. Please stop comparing your home internet connection with a 'leased line' setup. Your home connection will not maintain that 100Mbps all day, every day, even it it is reported as such. With a dedicated connection you do. It's that simple, regardless of what you imagine your home connection is, it will not come with the same speed and service levels a leased line would. I'm surprised that no one has yet mentioned child protection issues, but Tony may have gone to bed My apologies, I thought you were offering to point me to some guidance. A forum chat like this is of course interesting, but to fully assess this situation I'll need to review formal guidance and documentation. Your mention of legal issues made me assume there would be some online guidance for schools. As for stopping comparing to my home broadband...duly noted, I hereby cease! It doesn't stop me believing thought that there are many hidden costs and a distinct lack of value being offered in what my school currently recieves, as some of the responses have shown in comparing to their deals. I started this thread because I get very upset when a school with no IT understanding is potentially spending very scant money on an over-priced service. My only mission is to ensure the school spends everything it can on continuing to provide and improve teaching and learning in tough times. And tough times means looking for alternatives to expensive, bloated solutions sometimes!
localzuk Posted February 1, 2012 Posted February 1, 2012 Whilst you have input as a governor I would suggest that it's not your place to be shopping around. Indeed, it is not a governor's role to, in blunt terms, interfere with the day to day running of a school. If you have concerns, they should be highlighted via the normal channels (bring it up at a governor's meeting, or bring it up with the head for example) and justification requested when the expenditure comes up.
plexer Posted February 1, 2012 Posted February 1, 2012 If it's a primary then I can see that governors interests and expertise may be exploited more fully. I myself am a parent governor partly for that reason but still only provide an overview and advice. Ben
misources Posted February 1, 2012 Author Posted February 1, 2012 Not sure if you posted but is it primary or secondary? Does the school employ any it support staff? If so have you discussed these issues with them? Whilst you have input as a governor I would suggest that it's not your place to be shopping around. You will also find there is a contract period, possible early termination fees also. Ben Thanks Ben - it's a primary school and it gets a few hours from an external support company. I've talked to the administrator who really struggles with this and she's more than happy for the help as is the head. Not sure I understand the comment about not shopping around? Our governing team will do all it can to help the school where it can augment and assist, just happy to help.
misources Posted February 1, 2012 Author Posted February 1, 2012 Indeed, it is not a governor's role to, in blunt terms, interfere with the day to day running of a school. If you have concerns, they should be highlighted via the normal channels (bring it up at a governor's meeting, or bring it up with the head for example) and justification requested when the expenditure comes up. That's exactly how this came about :-) In our last governor's resources committee meeting we reviewed the finances and two governors expressed concern about the high cost of what seems to be a poor service. The head asked if we'd call our home provider's business arm to see what they could offer. Just what we've done. We're reporting back as per our normal governor process.
localzuk Posted February 1, 2012 Posted February 1, 2012 That's exactly how this came about :-) In our last governor's resources committee meeting we reviewed the finances and two governors expressed concern about the high cost of what seems to be a poor service. The head asked if we'd call our home provider's business arm to see what they could offer. Just what we've done. We're reporting back as per our normal governor process. Ah, that's good then. If you want to speak to some companies that offer comparable solutions, try Virgin's big red internet, also, Global AXS and Vaioni. They all provide good pricing.
glennda Posted February 1, 2012 Posted February 1, 2012 That's exactly how this came about :-) In our last governor's resources committee meeting we reviewed the finances and two governors expressed concern about the high cost of what seems to be a poor service. The head asked if we'd call our home provider's business arm to see what they could offer. Just what we've done. We're reporting back as per our normal governor process. One of the things i would do is talk to local secondaries - they tend to have far bigger IT teams and tend to help out with things like this for primaries - I know I do - not sure which part of Uk you are but if its southwards (east/west sussex/hampshire) drop me a PM and i'll see what i can dig up.
plexer Posted February 1, 2012 Posted February 1, 2012 I assume as a primary there is no on-site web filtering meaning it's done by the lea or whoever, if replacing it then you will need to consider that as part of any replacement service. Ben
misources Posted February 1, 2012 Author Posted February 1, 2012 Ah, that's good then. If you want to speak to some companies that offer comparable solutions, try Virgin's big red internet, also, Global AXS and Vaioni. They all provide good pricing. Fantastic, thanks for your suggestions, those are great solutions to review
misources Posted February 1, 2012 Author Posted February 1, 2012 I assume as a primary there is no on-site web filtering meaning it's done by the lea or whoever, if replacing it then you will need to consider that as part of any replacement service. Ben Will do, thanks Ben - I've found a couple of other threads on good filtering options. Appreciate all your input
elsiegee40 Posted February 1, 2012 Posted February 1, 2012 Primary tech steps in with a Safeguarding bit as @GrumbleDook hasn't appeared yet! I also happen to be a school governor! A school governor's role is supposed to be strategic; it isn't their job to get involved with the day to day running of the school. @misources your situation with a part time tech is that of most primaries. It is a fine balance between cost and support for all these things. Safeguarding MUST be considered... the school has a duty of care to ensure that pupils are kept safe within school and are given the wherewithal to stay safe beyond the school's boundaries - it's a limiting judgement by Ofsted. From a school's internet and email point of view that means that sound filtering needs to be in place either using a proprietary on-site filter like Smoothwall or using one that's bundled with an educational ISP's line through the LA or an external company like RM Whatever is there also needs to manage email and ensure that this cannot be used/abused... so the recent free offerings for schools are from Google and Microsoft's live@edu... or from an external company like RM's EasyMail ... or hosted internally using Microsft Exchange with appropriate software to monitor it like Impero Secondary schools typically have a team of people full time 52 weeks to manage these systems and even they will contend that keeping the school's network secure (no hacking , data protection, virus issues) and safe no undue risk caused to or by pupils) takes a considerable amount of time and effort. In a primary school, the team of one needs help. That help is by using managed services. I've used RM above because that's what's in my school... we're independent so LA services are not an option. It's not ideal and it's not cheap, but without it I could not do my job. I do agree that your service is expensive and it is possible that costs can be reduced, so shopping around is a good idea, but it must be done within the range of educational suppliers and standards, not domestic ones.
jamesreedersmith Posted February 1, 2012 Posted February 1, 2012 @misources Where in the country are you as many techs on here will then be able to offer specific information about what the service from the LA/RBC is and includes and what other options may be available.
GrumbleDook Posted February 1, 2012 Posted February 1, 2012 Hi @misources Just so you are aware ... I work for an LA, have been heavily involved with managing connectivity and services for schools, have helped develop a toolkit to support schools making decisions about connectivity and services ... and general independent advisor to schools and those providing IT support / management to schools (including governors). The comparison between home and business broadband is one that does come up every so often and use of the search facilities on the site will bring up a range of discussions which have been had before. The comparison between business and education connectivity / services is also one that comes up as well ... and there is a difference there too. As for eSafety / Safeguarding, there is a whole section of the site which covers many discussions and resources around this. It would be worthwhile having a look at the resources here, including the links to groups like the Home - UK Safer Internet Centre as well as the local resources in your LA from the eSafety staff / officer, as well as the Local Safeguarding Children's Board. I think that many members have already covered areas that are the marked difference between home broadband and schools services. The management of the services is an important issue that I cannot stress highly enough having worked with a few hundred primary schools. This is similar to the reason why many schools make use of additional software to manage computer systems within schools (e.g. RM's CC3/4, Viglen's Classlink, etc) as it gives a pretty good, standard setup that takes minimal work to keep it going, update it and has a ready support team to deal with any issues. Whilst it is simple for some schools to take on more of the load on this (hence why a number of larger schools will run vanilla networks and are more likely to want to look at just connectivity and no other services from a provider as they move more services into the control of the school ... but sometimes at a cost to time and staff, off-setting any straight savings). Perhaps one other thing I might add on a technical / operational basis is around possible traffic shaping. Depending on what services / access you need this may cause problems for you (which you can take as read that I have had to help out a few schools outside of my LA with exactly this issue!) For eSafety and legislation, some links have been put up already. The main sections of legislation centre around The Children Act 2004, H&S legislation (concerning the mental health of both children and staff) and aspects of law around illegal materials ... ranging from images / videos through to copyright breaches. One of the site sponsors (who specialise in filtering) has been supporting more research and advice on this which might be helpful for you. eSafety in Education | eSafety law | Inappropriate content liability ... it is worth saying that some schools will take more responsibility for this themselves than others ... and whilst using tried and tested solutions can be expensive, they are in the marketplace for a reason. I know some folk will opt for open sources solutions, but this is not a true alternative to a manageable system which is backed up by resources and expertise (regular updates to filter lists, improvements due to changes in how websites and search engines operate, etc). It can come as a surprise to some people how much effort it takes to keep things stable every time Google or Bing has a major change. There is one thing I would stress more than anything else ... whilst financial and technical considerations are important, the most important considerations are what will deliver the educational requirements to the school, on a consistent and reliable basis; what will enable the school to run all their services that the school needs to operate, remembering that some business that school do may require more secure systems than just over a home line ... which can be setup but will require more equipment / software / time / expertise or a combination of all of them; and keeping classroom teachers as that ... not as make shift technical staff (YMMV and depends on the desire to get involved). If you do have any more questions or need a bit more information about a particular aspect I am sure that the membership will be happy to do what we can. 2
synaesthesia Posted February 2, 2012 Posted February 2, 2012 Most of everything has been covered above. I shall hasten to add that you may have been jumped on a bit as value for money is something close to all of our hearts (we all know what our budgets are like!) yet money is literally a tiny consideration when safety and responsibility is in question. With this in mind, the responsibility for advising/choosing a supplier is (usually, hopefully) down to the IT experts: us guys. Thankfully we've plenty of places to get advice on this, this forum is a great example and better yet we (personally) have the benefit of guys like @GrumbleDook here to poke and prod when the need arises For instance, using a worst-case scenario: You browse somewhere and a "less than tasteful" popup screen, well, pops up. It turns out the "artists" "performing" on this popup screen are underage. A typical free filtering system alone, on a domestic type connection (or small business type connections made up of domestic connections like bonded DSL) - you could find yourself unemployable and on the sex offenders register. The school would be under investigation and responsibilities flung around, and people fired. A proper system, approved filtering at LA/ISP level, possibly accompanied by an on-site filter of choice: the popup probably wouldn't even happen. Even if it did, there's so much responsibility between yourself and your ISP that the worst that would happen is perhaps an internal investigation followed by your provider tweaking a few settings on their filters to stop it happening again. It's an extreme example but one that demonstrates the actual value of what you're buying into. Anyway, back to the lighter side: there's plenty of help to be had here, feel free to ask the whys and hows and you'll soon feel that you're far from alone in your situation. I also work with primaries so fully understand your situation as do many others here
Pottsey Posted February 2, 2012 Posted February 2, 2012 Hi, I'm new here so apologies if this question has been answered, but I'm just blown away by this... My local school spends £8.5k per year on broadband, the equivalent of around £700 per month. For 10MB ADSL. At home, 1 mile away, I get 100MB cable broadband for around £35 a month. Can someone help me understand?! I have one computer at home, getting 10x the speed of my school, for 5% of the cost?!! Something is wrong about this. I know how you feel; I am shortly due to get 120mb at home yet 20seconds walk away our secondary school is on 10mb. Which in my mind is crazy. Many say but School has a symetric connection but how is that a plus point when you get 100/10 or 120/12 at home against 10/10 at work? Plus I find the home connection depending on users in my area fluctuates less than the school connection and the home connection has way more uptime. I understand the extras like proxy & email along with the others but why can school connections not at least match mobile connation speeds, yet alone what I can get at home? Schools do get extra services and e-safty but unless I missed it no one has explained why School connections have to be so slow more so for the price you pay. Surely school connections for use over 100’s of devices should not be lagging behind in speed over mobile phone connections used for one device and should not be over 10x slower than home connections again used for a handful of devices.
localzuk Posted February 2, 2012 Posted February 2, 2012 I know how you feel; I am shortly due to get 120mb at home yet 20seconds walk away our secondary school is on 10mb. Which in my mind is crazy. Many say but School has a symetric connection but how is that a plus point when you get 100/10 or 120/12 at home against 10/10 at work? Plus I find the home connection depending on users in my area fluctuates less than the school connection and the home connection has way more uptime. I understand the extras like proxy & email along with the others but why can school connections not at least match mobile connation speeds, yet alone what I can get at home? Schools do get extra services and e-safty but unless I missed it no one has explained why School connections have to be so slow more so for the price you pay. Surely school connections for use over 100’s of devices should not be lagging behind in speed over mobile phone connections used for one device and should not be over 10x slower than home connections again used for a handful of devices. It varies by area. Here, schools get 100Mbit connections - which certainly aren't lagging behind. Up in Lancashire I remember a pile of secondary schools were getting 1Gbit connections. In my experience, the speeds your school gets comes down to a few things such as whether your ISP is directly to the RBC or to your LEA, whether your heads have pushed for faster connections in your 'schools forum' or similar decision making mechanism, the actual demand on bandwidth the school has (10Mbit might be plenty for some schools if they don't actually saturate it), and how quickly your LEA makes decisions and changes. Some areas can take years to come to a decision to do an upgrade, where others will do it quickly and efficiently. That sort of thing should be brought up with your LEA though, via your head teacher.
Pottsey Posted February 2, 2012 Posted February 2, 2012 Speaking about connections and packages are Learning platforms still mandatory? Is it ok to no longer use one?
tom_newton Posted February 2, 2012 Posted February 2, 2012 Oddly enough I am going to weigh in on the connection stuff, and not the filtering If we were able to use fast "home" connections at work, they would suddenly become very expensive, sure your one school could knock off that extra bandwidth at times of low use, but if this was offered to every school in your area, the 50:1 (or more) contention would suddenly become important again. These fast home connections are available from cable TV providers because they can do the 100meg bit for a fairly short leg back to a point where you get contended back to 50:1 or so. So they might have a single 100meg line to a housing estate where everyone is effectively "chipping in" to rent it, so it seems cheap. When you get a line at a school, you are paying extra for the carriage of your data right back to somewhere where you can get "proper" bandwidth, and you really can get your 10-up 10-down all the time. Because of this, you may find the cost difference at school form 10 to 100 is not much at all, because once you have gotten over the initial price hurdle of a "professional" internet connection, upping the speed is relatively easy (up to the speed of the media, which today will be minimum 10). For example, here at Smoothwall Leeds, we pay ~£1k/mo for 100Meg symmetric (with no added services mind) but it would have been 700 for 10. We moved from bonded DSL and for the first time we get consistently low enough latency to run voip. One thing to watch out for - some ISPs will send you bonded ADSL or SDSL. These products aren't quite as good, but they're perfectly serviceable in many areas, they should be somewhat cheaper though. If you ditch your LEA's service and buy your own connectivity and filtering, you can shop around, and you can spend on the bits you want to spend on. Some primaries are OK on a business DSL @ £60/mo. Its just a bit harder to manage as you have to buy in all the stuff and DIY it, and that does not come for free. Hope that makes a modicum of sense, not finished 1st coffee yet.
localzuk Posted February 2, 2012 Posted February 2, 2012 Speaking about connections and packages are Learning platforms still mandatory? Is it ok to no longer use one? I believe emphasis was taken off electronic learning platforms, and instead put more in terms of pupil and parent engagement. So, 'must' became 'should' in guidance documents.
GrumbleDook Posted February 2, 2012 Posted February 2, 2012 Speaking about connections and packages are Learning platforms still mandatory? Is it ok to no longer use one? The requirements of Online Learning Space and Online Tools for Parental Engagement are not mandatory, but the DfE view it that successful schools are using them ... so schools which are not successful should ask themselves why they aren't using them? In Mr Gove's speech at BETT he even mentioned about online assessment tools giving real-time information to staff and children about progress and achievement ... and that can, of course, by given from a VLE / LP or other online assessment system (e.g. SAMLearning, etc). There is very little central prescription about anything from the DfE at the moment and any attempt to try similar from LAs is viewed as a bad thing ... even when it works! (YMMV and yes I know there are lots who don't work ... and not usually because of the specific tools but because of the approach taken).
sidewinder Posted February 6, 2012 Posted February 6, 2012 Speaking from an Independant school POV, we pay around £4k for a 10Mb EFM line annually, but as an independant we don't get anything extra for that price, filtering, email etc we have to do in house. However, I still don't feel its a rip off. It could and probably should be a bit cheaper but there is no way I'd consider switching to a domestic ADSL connection. The reason being is that like others have said, that 10Mb is guaranteed, we always get that speed, up and down. Also if there is a problem I can be talkiing to someone at the ISP within minutes and they can get a BT engineer out within a few hours, thats the value of a SLA for me. Also, we use a standard ADSL connection in another office, and whilst it is roughly the same speed down, it regularly drops the connection, reconnects etc and speed definately drops. Not a huge issue in a small office or a home but that would get very frustrating in a school.
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