enjay

No longer useful to us doesn't necessarily mean EOL. In this case, it was a Surface 6 tablet which has poor battery life so is no longer fit for intended purpose, but if you mostly work plugged in and only short periods away from your desk, it would be okay. I did a quick eBay trawl and found what "parts only" Surfaces were selling for (surprisingly high actually, over £100!), and offered the staff member that. They declined.

I appreciate this is a zombie thread, but an interesting thing I discovered recently is if staff members want to buy old equipment from the school, they have to pay a "fair market value" for it - no giving it away, no selling it for £1, no giving it in exchange for a charitable donation to the school. This applies even if the equipment is no longer of any value to the school and would otherwise be going to recycling.

Our LA has just started using SAM School Admissions Module. The LA enter details of applicants, share the data with us, and we record admission criteria against each child. Oddly, it appears we might tell the LA a student has an EHCP or is LAC (you'd think the LA would know that), so we are sharing personal information, including special category. Do we need to do a DPIA for this or list them on our data sharing partners, or can we leave it since we're not the Data Controller?

Yes, "not possible" was perhaps not the right wording. "Complicated, expensive and not foolproof (and ethically dubious!)" would be more appropriate. As you say, ultimately it is the DSL's decision whether to chuck £££ at the problem, but I think I know what their view will be.

We are installing a cert on them so the Smoothwall can do SSL inspection.

Thanks everyone. I think I'll go back to the DSL and say it isn't possible!

That is the approach we would take. No-one has the time to trawl through logs looking for inappropriate content, but we could search for a specific string if something happened.

Or about 8% of our available / non-salary cost, but I take your point. - - - Updated - - - It would only happen during school time and on the school-provided WiFi, but I agree there are ethical questions to answer before doing it.

You may be right, although for us that would be around £100K per year to maintain. - - - Updated - - - That's who asked me to look into possible solutions!

Telling staff not to use Kahoot or Blooket doesn't feel like the right response.

The particular incident which brought this to the forefront was a highly offensive username in a Kahoot quiz or similar, but it sits amidst a rising trend of using various platforms to make anonymous libellous, reputation-damaging comments about our staff.

The keylogging wouldn't be on the pupil-owned devices, it would be on our Internet connection which is provided for educational purposes. If a student uses the Internet in a way which constitutes a safeguarding concern or bullying incident which we can then act on, I don't think that's over-reaching.

That would work, we've got a captive portal on the Smoothwall already anyway, so nothing would change from the student viewpoint. Would that also negate the need to get SSL certificates onto all the devices?

That might be a possibility, and would have picked this incident up. Is it on-premise or cloud? If cloud, can you turn it off on a schedule? Students are using personally-owned devices, so we need to make sure we're not monitoring them outside school.

Probably true about the passwords, but that is presumably also the case with client-based things like Smoothwall Managed Monitor. Unfortunately that doesn't help in this instance as the entire class were legitimately on the website, one of them chose to use it in a silly way.

I've been asked about a way to view what students are typing online which doesn't require any client-side installation. Does anyone know if such a thing exists? We have a student BYOD network, and there has been some inappropriate activity on it, so we'd like to see what we can put in place to prevent future occurrences.

When I needed to destroy one of those, the Science Department provided a strong magnet. When you say your e-waste company doesn't shred, you are just talking about the data cartridge not all HDD/SSDs, right?

And I have sympathy for those people, there are certainly some town/city centre roads I wouldn't want to cycle on, and places where I ride very defensively (which can further infuriate drivers, of course). Unfortunately some people think the best thing to do on a busy road is ride as close to the gutter as you can get, when sometimes the opposite is true. It is a different matter if someone is riding on the pavement to skip queues or lights though.

I Googled this after my earlier comment about age limits. Cycling on the pavement at any age is illegal, but under the age of 10 there's no criminal responsibility so you can't technically break the law at 6 or 7. Also, penalty charges can only be given 16+. Police are advised to use discretion about when to issue, so if the road is dangerous or you're accompanying a child, they won't do anything. The one time recently I've cycled on the pavement I was limping my bike home with a flat tyre (I figured it was better to ride slowly on the pavement than ride slowly on the road, and didn't want to walk that far in my cleats as I'd probably fall on my a$$ which is also dangerous!).

I live on a one-way street, and have had this conversation with cyclists going the wrong way along it. I don't bother with e-scooter riders since riding those in either direction is illegal!

That's a valid point. With Google Chat and Teams both available, staff are only using WhatsApp for familiarity.

I'm confident that's not the case with our SLT, but I take the point. I would agree with that for school-sanctioned communication or "official" school business, but surely we can't direct staff not to have any contact with colleagues via personal devices. Let's say I give a colleague a lift to work, should we have to get our laptops out to send an Office365 email saying we're running late? I also don't see how we can regulate colleagues who are also friends venting about a situation, just as we can't stop them venting to their non-school family or friends. Personally, I think the "use school devices only" ship has sailed now, but we can impose device management plans on people who choose to install school accounts on personal devices, and provide some guidance on what (not) to say to a friend on WhatsApp. Ultimately if these are personal devices being used for communication which the school has not required via that platform, wouldn't they fall outside an SAR anyway?

True, and why I obey red lights etc when I'm on my bike. There are points where I've cycled above the speed limit, which is legal but does expose you to the risk of being charged with the wonderfully named "cycling furiously" if you have an accident. I suppose maybe if the cyclist had been pushing their bike along the pavement, then got onto the main road after the lights they might be able to argue hierarchy as they hadn't broken any rules, but that's very thin ice as they're presumably responsible for ensuring they start riding in a safe manner which starting off in the middle of a cross-roads is not. Anyway, this particular cyclist had been riding along the pavement, because my wife had seen them do it.

ClassCharts doesn't store any data either, it's just a wrapper for the website; without a password to an active account, you can't view anything. Obviously someone could screen shot it, but the same applies to data on a school laptop too. Authenticator on personal devices is the preferred method, key fobs have been provided for those staff who declined (while there is a case for saying site is open 6am-9pm but they choose to work at home so can buy their own fob, we didn't fancy taking that hard line for the sake of £20 here and there!)

I think the Highway Code states children under 10 can cycle on the pavement. This presumably is also extended to adults cycling with them. I'm okay with cyclists who are on the pavement to avoid a dangerous road, less so with those who did it to avoid a red light.