JordanT91

A few times over the last few weeks my wife has been getting a faint T line on the 'old' stlye lateral flows. It appears anywhere from 35 minutes to 8 hours after testing. You're not supposed to take a result after 30 minutes but she's been for a couple of PCRs and they have been negative every time. No idea what's going on there!

Word on the grapevine is that control measures will be re-introduced after half-term. Our LA issued guidance yesterday basically saying we need to go back to having bubbles, no staff mixing, no trips out, no parent visits, face coverings in communal areas etc. This was almost immediately withdrawn apaprently because UKHSA (formerly PHE) and the DfE are issuing their own guidance to schools very soon.

I have, thank you. Quote number 21101908033490. We are not primary or secondary. We are an all-through SEN school. We have as many staff as a secondary school, but a primary school amount of pupils. Your pricing on the FTTP 1000/115 product is quite a bit higher than one of your competitors mentioned in this thread, with all the filtering etc., but at this stage I'm just looking to get an idea of costs and companies who can provide what we need.

Thank you, I didn't realise it was a nationwide thing. I've sent an enquiry.

It's been done through some sort of scheme, all schools in the county are getting done - we were just one of the first. Now the team that organises the network services and the broadband SLA need to catch up. But their prices seem very high.

That's handy, they are a fairly local company. I'll get in touch.

We've recently had a gigabit line installed and our LA are sorting out a service for it (may be a good few months/a year away). I've just seen the prices for the SLA and they seem ridiculously high so I've been looking at alternatives. So far I have a quote for 'FTTP' from Wave9 and leased lines from Exa, Daisy Comms and a local company who provides our SIP line. I'm waiting on a price from Schools Broadband. My question is, do I need a leased line? I understand the benefits for QoS, SLA etc but we aren't a massive school. Going from ~35Mbps to ~1000Mbps will make a huge difference though. There are some plans on the horizon that the increase in bandwidth will definitely make a more pleasent experience. My other question is, for those who have provisoned broadband without filtering, how much should I expect a DfE-approved filtering service to cost? Any recommendations for other companies would also be appreciated.

What I've been doing for the last 6 years is creating an email address in our O365, creating an Apple ID with it and logging into an iPad with that. Our iPads aren't assigned to particular people. I have discovered that I can create managed IDs though Apple School Manager but the same problem appears, a phone number is required as soon as I log into the iPad with that Apple ID. I'm not sure what the limit is but I'm definitely not going to use my personal number. Not sure what the solution is...

What's everybody doing about the requirement to have a phone number for each Apple ID? Previously I used to enter my work phone number but now it says I can't use it again. This is on accounts created the 'personal' way and through Apple School Manager. I'm a bit stuck, I can't think how I can get some new iPads set up!

Actually it's the opposite. They are more accurate in people with a high viral load ie. is likely to be displaying symptoms. It's just the government doesn't want them to be used when people are displaying symptoms. Key difference.

Without a doubt. It's been on my radar for a while but unfortunately it hasn't happened yet for various reasons.

I'm having some issues with SharePoint 2010 Foundation. I know, it's old! For the past couple of weeks, staff have been complaining that documents (the majority are Word) are taking at least a minute to open, save etc. The issue happens on Office 2016 and 2019. When the documents are loading, it stays on the Word blue splash screen with "starting..." for a while. This appears to be widespread throughout school though interestingly not for me... I've had a look through the Windows logs on the server, the SharePoint logs and the IIS logs. I've set up PRTG to monitor the whole network and have also set up close monitoring on the server in question, SharePoint and IIS on that server. The only odd thing I can see is that in the IIS logs there are quite a few 401 unauthorized errors when people are opening documents. I can't see it being a permission is though, because nothing has changed and the documents do open after a little while. This might be a red heron. Another thing I've noticed, which again might be totally irrelevant, is that on the client machines (including mine), there are an awful lot of errors in the event logs "a fatal error occurred while creating a TLS client credential. The internal error state is 10013." Has anyone experience anything like this? I can't think of anywhere else to look.

The nasal flu vaccines due in school this week for our pupils has been cancelled because the NHS team that does it is gearing up to start the Covid jabs in school. Like many other schools, we've had a few of those emails from the anti-vaxxers threatening legal action.

Each school has a contingency plan for when the amount of infections goes over a certain threshold. This will vary based on LA etc. but for us, if we have 2 positive cases within a 'group' (registration class, english group, after school club etc.) within 10 days then we contact the LA and begin escalating our control measures. This would likely be reintroduction of bubbles for the whole school and wearing of facemasks in communal areas by staff.

Well it's started. 1 positive teacher this morning. We've had a few kids come in yesterday with Covid in their household but of course they can come to school...

Sorry! I discovered this exact caveat a few days ago and I had every intention of posting it here in case somebody hadn't realised. Yes the server drivers have to exactly match the drivers on the PCs. I've seen a few comments online about using pnputil to add the driver to the clients, but a few have missed out the add-printerdriver step. Like you said, the drivers actually have to be installed because pnputil only adds them to the repository. My step by step is now exactly the same as yours and it seems to have worked for me, so hopefully you don't run into any issues!

I've done that. I've deployed the drivers with pnputil via SCCM, but the printers mapped via GPO aren't appearing for users. No idea what's going on...

So the caretaker is back at work today, I wasn't expecting him until tomorrow because his household's isolation shouldn't end until tonight. I showed him the calendar and counted the days out. The worrying thing is that his wife has been out of isolation since the weekend because the app told her to. I had to explain that the need for a household to isolate for 10 days overrides whatever the app is telling you... He's going back home to isolate now, in case Test and Trace ring to see if he's still isolating. He said they haven't been in contact at all, no text messages or phone calls. It's no wonder the rate of infection is what it is... First you've got people who don't understand the rules and then Test and Trace aren't actually making sure people are isolating when they should be. The whole thing is a mess.

Full details available here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1X5SgRwxSIBJNnAGnT8rroKeX8rVpXEJI

Apologies if I've missed a thread. Windows 10, including Education and Enterprise editions, will be end of life in October 2025. Apparently 'Windows 11' will be announced this month. I personally welcome it, I've never been a fan of Windows 10. Hopefully with this next version of Windows they do a better job of removing unnecessary rubbish from the Education version right from the start.

Well that's me and the wife booked for 5 days in Portugal at half term. After the year we've had, we can't wait. Seriously cheap too...

if anyone is interested, I purchased FileBrowser for Education for the iPads. It allows in-place editing of Office documents and also allows mapping directly to a user's H drive which Foldr struggled with.

Switched to 16:9 screens a few years ago.

Yep. Major problems in Taiwan. I think the US is trying to ramp up production, but it's likely going to take a couple of years to get levels back to what they were. Which is annoying because I've needed to upgrade my graphics card for a year already... Pre-builts PCs seem to be the only way you can get hold of a graphics card for near the RRP. Novatech had a good offer on yesterday.

Hmm that might work. I've just tried it and when sharing a document to Word, it only opens as read only. I have to save a copy somewhere, make the edits then send it back to Documents to save to the drive. That's a bit of a faff!