Rob_D

As far as I'm aware, our LA (we're a maintained school) is starting the procurement process now-ish. Of course there's a chance we stick with ESS, I think we find out February next year.

I have a vague memory of the series 1 candidates fighting over packed lunch supplies in the house after they'd been told any lunch they bought would come out of their task profits. Not that I disagree that as it's gone on they seem to shop more and more for the zany personalities. But there were plenty of crazy-people arguments in the early series.

To be fair, I've never heard anyone "bleating about their right" IRL. Just on-line.

Is that overall, per-capita, per-test?

Earlier in the thread there was mention of an max price increase at 2.5%+CPIH.

Maybe I'm a cynic, but if they become a requirement or standard for new builds you know that's exactly the kind of thing the planners/builders would do.

My guess: "If the school's open to teachers and students then we need XYZ support." (catering, site team, ICT, etc)

Our staff briefing this morning suggested that schools would be a special case when it came to WFH, and we're waiting for the official DFE guidance (good odds on that not arriving long enough before the end of term to make any difference). But then the school has always been slightly against WFH unless we really have to.

Similar to bald_pig. At home, I've paired a couple of ikea-alex units with a length of kitchen worktop (I originally had an ikea desktop, but it wasn't very hard wearing and I wanted something bigger). It looks pretty neat and the black laminate finish doesn't look at all officey. Between premade desktops and worktops there's plenty of choice of finish. Depending on your skills/time you could even get some wood offcuts and finish them however you want. If you really want some RGB then there's plenty of stick-on strips on amazon. If the desks are going side by side then you might be able to save a bit by having a single, run of bench-type-desking for both stations. That said I would be interested to know what you choose and how it works out.

When I had mine they were enforcing the full 15 min for people who'd had both the booster and the flue jab, but a shorter wait for people who'd only had the booster.

What are you using for your wifi at the moment? (Assuming you have wifi but no guest access) I ask because all the guest network options I know of are built into managed wifi solutions, I've never heard of a guest wireless solution that would drop over an existing network. So if your current wifi doesn't support a guest network (it's worth doubble checking even some home solutions seem to do it now), you'd potentially be looking at replacing your wireless. That said... At the moment we use Fortinet managed wireless, but we're about to move to Aruba central. I've used unifi wireless both in a previous school and at home. All of these support guest wifi, we've always done it as wireless users with a set expiration based on how long the visitor needs to keep using the wireless. I hope this helps.

My early experiences getting into work were somewhat mixed. Starting out, I leaned hard on family connections to find jobs and did a lot of part time gigs. In the end I somewhat fell into working at the school I currently work at and have managed to work my way from tech up to management. From my experiences, when you're starting out who you know can be more important than what you know.

Run, run while you still can. But seriously congrats on the masters and best of luck finding a job. What positions are you looking for?

We've got Xibo running off a windows server here. So far it works fine (apart from RSS feeds). While I can't see us going back to something simpler like ShowPoint now, it does look like a very neat solution.

I had this discussion with a doctor friend who said that your theory holds more for bacterial infection than viral infection because bacteria do require a higher load to gain a foothold, but due to viruses having a much higher growth/replication rate once a virus gets inside you you're just as likely to become infected and show symptoms with 1-2 "virus particles" as with 100+. What masking/handwashing/distancing is really doing reducing the % chance of those viruses getting to part of your body where they can survive and replicate. TBH he is known for talking out his a$$, but it kind of makes sense.

I wouldn't have expected the hardware to effect our problem as it was due to us hitting a documented limitation in the system. Although I can't find any mention of it now, so maybe MS has patched out that particular problem, as I said it's been a couple of years since we virtualized the file server to fix the issue.

Quite possibly. As I understand it, our issues were due to hitting the Storage Spaces file-operations-per-second limits.

Just be careful about using tiered storage on anything other than a virtual host. It doesn't (or didn't a few years back when we tried it) handle lots of smaller files very well.

True. But theoretically (under Darwin's laws), the virus should still undergo a form of natural selection. It's just down to the right selection pressure being applied. If people who showed severe symptoms were able to be adequately isolated quickly enough to stop spread, it would create an environmental pressure that selects for asymptomatic variants. And TBH, a dominant, 99% asymptomatic variant would probably be considered a win by most people. Of course this is all theory, and subject to being able to apply the right environmental pressure (which I think is where it's falling down right now).

Hi. We've got at ACT door/access control software for managing access to the site. For the most part it works well for staff access (ID badge access) and student/general access (mag-lock release times). But visitor and letting management is super clunky and hard work, and I can't help but feel there has be a better way to do this that we're not seeing. For example, today we were asked to set up access through the carpark gates for an evening meeting 17:00-21:00. Standard setup for this would be: create a time-zone for 17:00-21:00 on Tuesdays. create a user group that applies this time-zone to the carpark gate create a user in this group with the PIN attached and a validity period that just covers this Tuesday. This is a lot of work for what is ostensibly a one off event and leads to us having dozens of time-zones and groups for every little event or letting group (as they all want slightly different combinations of access times/days and doors). For safety and security, we try to keep access to the minimum required. Is there anyone who's using the ACT, who knows if there's a better/easier/more efficient way to this sort of thing? Or is this just a case of the software not really being designed with this kind of thing in mind? Thanks for any help!

I had a Carphone Warehouse one last week. He hung up sharpish when I asked how he had my number.

Yes. The desktop Outlook signatures are (by default) stored in %appdata%\Microsoft\Signatures. I would love MS to make it so they could be synced between desktop Outlook and Office 365, but it doesn't look like something that's even on the roadmap. So even if PS does scrub everyone's 365 signatures it's not going to effect your other devices. To do that, you need 3rd party apps, and even then they don't really sync anything they just centrally set the same signature across different users and platforms. For what their endgame is, OP might be best just getting a 3rd party signature app like https://www.exclaimer.com/exclaimer-cloud/signatures-for-exchange/ (others are available)

ETA on some (non DfE) iPads we bought is mid January. I wonder if it's because the DfE scheme is hoovering up the UK supplies.

I can't imagine there's a household that doesn't have a couple of old unused phones you could use to save having to buy a new one.

In what way? If they're too young to have some sort of mobile, then they're too young to be using the house phone without asking permission from the parent. And probably too young to be left home alone. Ergo, child needs to make a call, he asks parent and parent gives him the phone.