pete

With my MAT hat on, I'd ask why are they trekking out to the school to get SIMS data when for £5/month/school you can pull that data into a Wonde API and then a MAT-wide Power BI dashboard. It's exceptionally good for normalising data from random MIS platforms into something sane and usable. But as others have said, get authorisation from an appropriate person in writing and provided appropriate access. I'd also have a word with your HT and ask if they're sitting on any other access requests since $MAT_person turning up was likely something they (or one of their direct reports) knew about. When we take on a new school we try very hard not to step on toes, but that does rely on the school SLT looping their staff into requests in a timely manner.

We have a few Bromcom test instances and document matching upon bulk import ( https://docs.bromcom.com/knowledge-base/how-to-import-student-documents/ ) isn't working in them. It's not clear whether this is an issue with the test instance, some undocumented thing we're missing or the functionality not actually working as described. Files upload without issue, but matching (via AdNo or UPN) doesn't work. So if you have Bromcom and a spare 5 minutes, could you: Rename a sub-5MB PDF with a student admission number. In Bromcom, click in the top-right corner (your user icon) > My Documents Click Import Select Admission Number Select "Begins with" or "Contains" as appropriate Drop the PDF onto Step 03 Click Upload Click Next Ideally you should now see a suggested student based on the admission number in the filename. We've tried variations of admission number and UPN in the filename and we have no matches. That's across two schools. cheers Pete

^ Typically your school business manager / finance director / bursar (if you're old-school) will have experience using frameworks for other things and you should work with them (at least the first time round). We use the CPC framework (https://www.thecpc.ac.uk/members - you may even find your school already on there), the Crown Commerical frameworks (https://www.crowncommercial.gov.uk/agreements/RM6174 for example) and we've also used NHS frameworks that we're eligible for (network hardware mostly).

We renewed with Kyocera (direct, via framework). It's early days but our finance dept is much happier they don't have to deal with the previous supplier, the kit's decent, techs are (by all accounts - haven't met one yet) polite and knowledgeable and *touch wood* Kyocera are yet to do anything that would endanger their chances of contract renewal.

^ "Wrestling Access Control into a single dashboard for reporting and authentication across multiple school sites" (not it - I've got MIS migrations ruining my calendar for the next month).

Mostly OK, with occasional inexplicable annoyances (MFA re-prompting after X days in conjunction with number-matching is unreliable in the current version). So more or less like Windows.

"Practical cybersecurity easy wins". Things that are cheap to implement (money & time) with a big impact to security but minimal impact on the end-user experience. Ideally things that a technical audience may not have come across before (or aren't widely known/done). Given some of the posts on here of late, a primer on the difference between criminal and civil liability wouldn't go amiss.

Maybe post a list of the topics that are already covered? I can guess from the vendors, but I didn't spot a "Bob's talking about X in Y" list.

In a medical emergency? Phone (school phone or personal mobile) or pick two responsible students and send them both to the (always staffed with first aiders) office with actionable info. Our test is "You have a child who's just split his head open on a table while trying to do a backflip. You're stemming the bleeding until a first aider appears. Is your first aider alert mechanism usable without access to both hands or another adult?" Hence the "Bob and Sarah - go to the main office and ask for a first aider and tell them Firstname Lastname is in classroom 02 with a head injury. Repeat that back. Right, off you go."

If you've lost all admin access and there isn't a break-glass account in the finance safe, you'll need to contact Microsoft and prove your organisation is the owner of the tenant. Pull together all the information you have, get a cup of tea and be prepared to spend a lot of time on the phone. If you bought Microsoft licensing for the tenant through a reseller they may be able to provide a contact or two to speed the process along. Have you asked HR if they recognise the phone number associated with it? Was it a previous employee's personal phone (staff leavers in the MIS will still have phones attached)? Did they leave on good terms? If they did, get the headteacher (who they'll recognise) to ring them?

I could maybe see a nation state distributing / messing with a shipment of pagers that (with a modern rechargable battery) go bang after X amount of charge cycles or a specific message is delivered. But it's a bit indiscriminate, assumes anyone holding/near the pager is the enemy and wouldn't basic opsec recommend sourcing pagers from multiple sources. Keep an eye out for a massive lawsuit from a pager manufacturer, I guess.

We also have BYOD for Y12 and Y13. Our schools have the "if your phone is out during the day and spotted, it's getting confiscated until the end of the day" rule for Y7 - 11. Y12 & 13 can use their phones during private study or if the class teacher OKs it. They can't have them out in the corridors (stops whining from younger students, prevents traffic jams from students on their phones). We are quite rural, the majority of students travel by bus and buses only come along every hour or two. Having an independent means of calling your parents is essential.

So, squirrel or the estates team being a little cavalier with a strimmer?

There is a lot of research, but the conclusions are at best inconclusive, or don't ask the people under discussion (students) and instead rely on opinions from parents and teacher or (at worst) are pushing a particular agenda rather than trying to answer the question. I am aware of Jonathan Haidt's work and he (in particular) has received quite a lot of criticism from his peers. That's before we raise our eyebrows at his assertion (in said book) that students should be more religious and his support of policies that seek to remove LGBTQ content from the Internet: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/05/candice-odgers-teens-smartphones/678433/ (or Nature link if you have a subscription: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00902-2 - I couldn't find a free version)

^ Why consider things seriously and do proper research when you can spin a moral panic to meet your political or promotional agenda? Still, at least they're not playing heavy metal backwards or engaging in D&D.

You need to meet a much higher bar to justify audio recording (in workplace and public locations) than you do video recording. You also need to explicitly make sure that everyone knows it's in place. Signage such as "CCTV with Audio Recording is active in this area" **before** the person gets to an area where they will be recorded. https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-resources/cctv-and-video-surveillance/guidance-on-video-surveillance-including-cctv/how-can-we-comply-with-the-data-protection-principles-when-using-surveillance-systems/ TLDR: Don't wing it.

Initially ran it on our own tin when we started out, but moved it to a VM to make it hardware agnostic and make migration easier.

And I'm guessing the incorrectly-created staff account has got a weeks worth of data linked to it now, right? Ideally, you'd delete the incorrectly-created staff account (if you caught it early enough). How many behaviour incidents did the trainee open?

So initially an audit of current provision (ParentMail) to see if you're making the most of what it can offer?

What's the behaviour management data that's been created?

What problem are they trying to solve? What communication types does SLT think they should improve? Is this "your kid's not at school, are they ill?", "hey, we have a French trip?", "remember to pick your GCSE options?", "Look at the cool thing your kid did?" Has the school sought feedback from parents on what works/doesn't work for the parents? Of the communication methods used, what does the school office think is most effective (rate of response/return)? More generally: Don't spam parents, be succinct and sparing in your general (not pupil-specific) communications. Limit who can send messages to groups of parents beyond size X. If there's a PE trip, nature walk and Bulgarian nosewhistling on offer to the same year group the same week, send it in one message. Honour unsubscribe requests for things not directly relating to their child/child's education. Fix broken parental emails in your MIS. Including any early September "let's duplicate existing parents when importing Y7" problems Your headteacher (or whoever they delegate it to) will grumble about having to write things for it, but a termly school newsletter can bundle up a lot of comms if planned in advance with an eye to the school calendar. Send it out via website/email/ and link to it on social media. Work out how many deny lists (public or otherwise) your MIS' preferred SMS/email provider is on. DPIA, SSO, SMS pricing. Can they use the free text bundles from the government? And as noted above, if they can't use Wonde to populate the data into whatever third-party comms platform you're considering - knock it off the list. You do not want to be wondering if the school office updated a third party platform via CSV on the morning of a snow day. Our schools use a mix of InTouch (bit pants, typically blocked by Yahoo and/or Hotmail for portions of the year), ePraise (works well at one of our schools), teachers2parents (primary, no real data other than I don't hear grumbles about it) and ParentMail (primary, generally well regarded by the school using it). In short, to solve/recommend the IT parts of this problem/solution, you need data from SLT and your current brief is vague.

If you're using Locker, Salamander or SDS and you're creating "teachers of Bob Bobblington, 7B" groups in AD/365 so you can email "teachers of Bob Bobblington 7B" and not spam everyone else, you could use that to set permissions in OneDrive such that only teachers of a student can access that OneDrive. Worth a chat with Salamander/Locker as this is their bread and butter.

Will be interesting to see how many refund requests come into their finance office.

If students have lockers, your estates staff may have a source of compatible barrels (and possibly keys, assuming cheap wafer locks) already. Also a good excuse to learn how to pick a lock, but run it by your HT/Line manager first so they can head off any "er....can we have a word about Scifigirl?" concerns.

Yeah, ALG is off because it's always terribly implemented. 3rd party support looked into it and the gist is. While direct STUN may still work, it's deprecated in 3CX and if you open a 3CX support ticket related to issues with phones talking directly to 3CX they'll close the tickets with "we don't support STUN anymore, use the softphone or deploy an SBC/routerphone". So I'm currently rolling out SBCs (each school has at least one Hyper-V host) to the primaries. However, that's a problem for people WFH with a physical phone plugged into their BT homehub.