Ephelyon

So maybe, as I said, changing it rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater would be a good approach. Having said that, I must admit I can't see any great utility to websites like ask.fm (considering everything else that's out there), but then again people said the same thing about Twitter versus Facebook, so I'm sure there's some benefit. As long as we can take steps to make it a little safer.

I think a lot of cyberbullying and trolling relies on the ability to be anonymous very easily. As it's the Internet, if you want to be anonymous slightly less easily you can do it regardless, but I think a lot of what goes on with ask.fm is comparable to "opportunistic" crimes where the perpetrator only goes to the bother of committing the crime because of how easy it is (I'm sure others could provide a better summary). Therefore I wonder whether a petition (or other effort) to ask the site to consider its policies - rather than closing down completely and thus depriving the owners of its income - might be more effective. One of the major problems with ask.fm is the ability to post anonymously. Would it be worth starting there? The site could mandate that a user must be registered - possibly even going through an identity confirmation process (sounds like a "down the line" goal) similar to that of e.g. CouchSurfing - before being allowed to post a question? As an extension, the site could adopt practices similar to Facebook or LinkedIn, whereby one could for example view a user's questions page but not post there unless they were sufficiently "closely connected" (by whatever means). That would seem more plausible than attempting to force a website that for all intents and purposes is neutral in approach to close down over "a little local difficulty" (apologies, but we all know how this can be viewed by people who have different priorities).

Signed it.

It seems there is a difference of scale (and budgets!) here; we have some areas connected by fibre, others are simply through copper. I've been happy with maintaining at least a 2-Gig link across the site though. Either way I think the core wired infrastructure will become more and more of an issue the more we lean towards global wireless.

We're all HP here too, mainly 2610s and the like to the desktop. That does sound like a good idea. The core design of the network here was to utilise both uplink ports; combined with other structures thus creating at least a 2GB trunk around the site. We also have several chained 24-port switches in a single cabinet as opposed to fewer 48-port models, using each other's uplink ports respectively. There were reasons for that which I'm not privy to as I wasn't the NM at the time and all the County engineers involved at the time were "disposed of" with the loss of the Harnessing Technologies grant. But I like the idea - something to consider if we ever do manage to expand our switching capacity!

It's a budgetary thing mainly. We have no money for expanding the infrastructure, either wired or wireless. The 11 APs (that we had £3K for a couple of years ago) cover the site but only butter-thin. Adding an AP onto the trolley means I can include it in an overall quote for "providing a trolley-load of tablets as a bookable ICT suite for classroom use" plausibly without causing an upset. But you're right, it's not the ideal solution. We need a "dollar signs" emoticon here... So presumably in your scenario you have APs in certain locations that happen to have 1GB switches serving them, while not all switches are in fact 1GB. We're not in that position; we had no money for a site survey so the APs had to be positioned arbitrarily in locations that seemed to provide decent enough coverage, but then you can't guarantee all the available cabs will have 1GB switches in them...

@mrbios, I agree with you completely and we're keeping Fast Ethernet to the desktop here for now for the same reasons... we are also similarly sized to the OP. However, and just because it's been topical here, there is one scenario that does seem to point towards gigabit to the desktop, and that is wireless networking. We have 11 APs distributed around the site. Each can easily handle a classload of 30 devices or so, as far as the AP itself is concerned, but ultimately the switch port it feeds back to is Fast Ethernet. That means you're sharing 100Mbps between 30 devices. In that scenario, it does seem nicer to be able to say, "We'll be able to share 1000Mbps between 30 devices and it doesn't matter which switch cabinet the AP ultimately feeds back to as they're all Gigabit." It's of particular note if you do what we're doing and have a laptop/tablet trolley with an additional AP on top that's designed for use with just those devices at a particular time, so you have wireless anywhere regardless of your coverage around the site... but again, that idea only works well if you can guarantee that any network point you plug it into in a classroom has sufficient bandwidth to allow for it!

Are we saying that because it's possible to report misuse of a service, such misuse becomes "by the by"? We might as well be saying that because you can report rape, you don't really need to worry about it.

Looks good - nice to see more specialist roles in schools! =]

I'm actually pretty impressed by this - it's the first time I've seen such a (very true) statement on an educational IT job spec: "• A very CLEAR understanding of the delicate position held, and an absolute understanding of the need for strict confidentiality and delicacy." However, I would point out that the school also ought to have a very CLEAR understanding that the totality of what they're asking for is worth significantly more than £15K. Can the school comment on how many others might hold this position?

The Epson range of interactive projectors are also a good alternative if you like interactive gear, and come in very cheap at about £1,200 for the full solution (minus speakers, though they do have basic speakers built-in) with replacement bulbs costing only around £50. The EB-485Wi is a good example. We've put one in here to very good feedback and we may be putting another one in in September.

If you have time to get an application for review under Single Status in before the conversion, I'd make that a top priority. If senior managers refuse to progress it themselves, in our County at least there are other methods for staff to bypass them, go straight to County HR and do it themselves. The advantage to you there is that, if it's done and dusted before the conversion, you'll be TUPEd over on your new salary, not the old one... whereas if you wait and are TUPEd over on your current salary, you will have no guaranteed recourse whatsoever to ask for a pay rise (job specs don't matter then) once the school has achieved academy status. I have oodles of resources on this, sample job specs, the full NJC evaluation scheme (if that's what you're under) etc if you feel that would speed up any application you might want to make.

But in an ideal situation, both groups can and do try; some can even be relatively successful at that on both "sides" of the equation.

Isn't that Ofsted's own "policy"?

Cameron's answer would seem to be "block British"...

It does seem like just one step closer to the Great Firewall of China.

Shameless advertising: the book "The WiFi Generation" goes into detail about this, saying how filtering on the family PC is useless as long as they (or a friend) have a smartphone. "We can no longer constrain or forbid them; we who were once taught to be streetwise must now teach our children to be mediawise."

In fairness, they do seem to have been quite specific in terms of suggesting that this is online pornography that depicts rape... so presumably your bog-standard old-school pizza delivery guy scenario is safe for a little while longer. The "old" Internet maxim that "if it exists, there is porn of it" would seem to suggest that the majority of porn will continue unabated. I'm sure other interested bodies [no pun intended] can discuss whether or not that's a good thing...

I suppose the "possess by viewing" argument might work if it's the type that caches and you haven't cleared your browser cache in a while...

Sounds much more plausible!

"A secure database of banned child porn images gathered by police across the country will be used to trace illegal content and the paedophiles viewing it." I'm almost not sure what to make of this part. Does it mean they actually store these images centrally? Is it really necessary to store the exact images you are banning just so you can say "ah yes, that IS a naughty one!" I don't mean not to be taking it seriously, I'm just really not sure what they mean by this database business. Also, is the government sufficiently above the law that they can get around the legislation that says it's not permissible to store or access such imagery?

I take it there's no NM in post already? If not, and you're doing things like managing the team, dealing with suppliers, negotiating contracts and etc, then you definitely have a case. It also depends on the type of school. If it's a state-maintained school and your LEA has been through Single Status, it might be worth checking out other available job specs to see whether there's a closer match to your current duties than the one you're currently on.

Let me be clear that I'm certainly not disagreeing with that and, if the tender is already rapidly moving towards promulgation, naturally it's good advice. But it strikes me that what's been posted could be more of a consultative brief to be used internally - possibly even with a focus on our purposes here on EduGeek - and that nothing has yet gone forward for supplier attention. Either way I imagine the discussion could benefit from more detailed explanation as to the situation the OP is in and what stage the school is at with this process.

Sometimes that happens when people are in a position where they can only feed back other people's thinking, woolly-headed or otherwise. I'm sure many of us have been in that position with suppliers when we are obliged to ask for what the SLT wants, even though it's not something we'd have proposed ourselves in a million years. We don't know that isn't the case for the OP. Indeed, I'd expect that at this level many of the framing decisions - around shinies or otherwise - are being taken by the SLT (or SLT-to-be if this is a completely new school). For a new Leadership Team investigating potential avenues for technology-supported pedagogy, schools like the Essa Academy in Bolton can be perceived as "beacons" for others to follow. Naturally in an existing school we can make plenty of arguments against that if we so choose, based on existing infrastructure and the like... but in a new school all the doors could be seen as open. Even the ones with nasties on the other side, which indeed, the uninitiated might not realise. The OP might have the arguably unenviable task of convincing them not to go there in the end. I'd also invite members to consider that if they believe the OP is wasting their time, the very easy alternative is simply not to comment.

I think what the OP has posted there is intended as a draft summary - I'm sure the final tender would be much longer and, if necessary, written in a different style. I'm obviously not a mod but can I also point out that there does seem to be a bit of lambasting going on here. Writing a tender for a complete network from scratch is a mammoth task. Clearly we do all want to help but the OP is a new user to the forum and has asked us to be constructive. EduGeek has a good reputation as a professional place to go for technical queries in education. The point about MIS systems is a good one as e.g. SIMS tends not to play well with anything except Microsoft Office, and then only particular versions depending on what Capita is officially supporting at the moment. As far as 1:1 schemes go, there are options out there for leasing equipment (accidental damage insurance may or may not be covered) directly to parents for their pupils with zero cost to the school - Stone Computers operates one of these - depending on whether or not passing such costs onto parents is an option. As a free school I must admit I have no idea how tight the regulations are around this. Ricoh printers are pretty good for managed print schemes and there's also an app (called HotSpot) for mobile printing for many different types of devices. The Aficio MP 305SP is the model we're considering going with around the school as it supports integration with PaperCut MF plus the HotSpot app for printing from Apple or Android tablets. It may take a bit of setting up but it's worth it as printing is something often not considered when going for mobile devices. On the subject of mobile device provision, Meraki is a good MDM for Apple devices, though it's very limited in its support for managing / locking down Android tablets. If you can afford it, I'd get another server with a couple of quad-cores and somewhere in excess of 48GB RAM to use as a terminal server. That can be used for tablet access to the school network during the day and a fast remote access server for the staff (and pupils?) after school hours. We're doing that here by means of our DR virtual host as - assuming there's no disaster - those 12 cores and 64GB RAM are sitting around doing not very much during the day. I've also set up a shell for accessing documents and programmes without running a full desktop session, which vastly reduces user footprint on the terminal server. I'd agree that a second administrative network isn't the way most schools are going; could you VLAN it instead? Can you also expand a little more on "specialist network access" for individual departments? Before you know it these general terms can balloon out into HoDs dictating a vast amount of different ways of doing things that just don't play well together overall.