Case studies

Blessed Hugh Faringdon Catholic School

Blessed Hugh Faringdon Catholic School is a high performing co-educational secondary with a thriving Sixth Form in Reading, Berkshire.

Dr Uttley, Headteacher, and his team reviewed the online safeguarding needs of the school and decided that the Full Monitoring Service was the best option.

Benefits

Key benefits of having a fully managed service:

Allows school staff to continue with their daily duties thus eliminating the impact on their time
Ensure the school is compliant with their statutory duty under KCSiE and the Prevent duty
Provides a cost-effective alternative to the school having to monitor the information themselves
The school still has access to the capture data as and when required and can export specific incident information as evidence
Added support and guidance from safeguarding experts at ITS4all and Securus if an incident does occur, ensures that the school has total peace of mind.

Testimonial

“Blocking and filtering of websites is not enough. What is required is monitoring of all online activity and the specific information to enable us to make lasting changes to students’ behaviour. Any system also needs to be capable of addressing problems that face a school today and in the future. The Full Monitoring Service provides us with the answer to all these issues.”

Dr Uttley, Headteacher

Royal Alexandra and Albert School, Surrey

The Royal Alexandra and Albert school is a leading co-educational school in Reigate, with flexi-boarding pupils from the age of 7 to 18 years of age.

At an early stage the school recognised the potential dangers inherent via the Internet, email and Classroom Learning Systems. The school is committed to meeting pupil care responsibilities to the greatest extent possible, and therefore set out to investigate whether any solutions existed that could overcome the inherent weaknesses

Benefits

Key benefits of having a fully managed service:

Reduced parental concern regarding the use of ICT within the school
Substantial improvements in the behaviour of pupils using ICT
Dramatic reduction in teachers’ wasted time
More productive use of ICT for lessons and homework
Improved ability to monitor harassment, bullying and racial taunting
Substantial time savings for teaching staff and ICT coordinators
Drastic reduction of undesirable activities both in and out of class
More effective updating of URL blocking lists
Confidence to allow email and Internet access in the boarding houses

Testimonial

“By installing Securus, we have been able to implement a fast, simple and cost effective approach to ensuring acceptable use of Internet and email. I am now happy that we are providing pupils with access to a network with unlimited Internet access that is nevertheless safe.”

Mr Mark Dixon, Headmaster

St John Bosco College, Battersea

St John Bosco College in Battersea, London, is a mixed Roman Catholic school for 11-18 year-old pupils.

The school has a commitment to academic excellence along with a distinctive, caring, ethos which is summed up in the word RUAH, Hebrew for ‘breath of life’ which represents their core values of Respect, Understanding, Affection and Humour.

Benefits

Key benefits:

Easy installation: “Our relationship with Securus has been excellent. They have made the school feel like a partner rather than a customer. From a technical standpoint, my ICT staff have found the software very flexible and adaptable and together with Securus we have tailored the solution to meet our own specific requirements, ensuring the implementation was trouble free.”
Reassuring parents, teachers and students: “The implementation of Securus has ensured that parents can feel confident about their children being able to use school’s technology safely,” says Paul.“My teachers feel the same. The high degree of scrutiny and transparency offered by Securus, enables them to get on with the business of teaching, knowing that the students are safe.
It is not only the parents and teachers who feel reassured. Pupils can also use the school’s ICT systems and know that they are being protected as well as knowing that their IT activities are being supervised in the same way as any other aspect of school life.”

Testimonial

“Keeping our children safe is our number one priority when it comes to their use of ICT. We faced the same issues that all schools face in trying to ensure that our children were protected from malicious or harmful content and that they were not able to circumvent the stringent safeguards we had in place to access blocked sites. We also needed to be sure that we knew exactly what was being accessed, the answer was Securus.”

Dr Paul Dunne, Headteacher

“We have used Securus for many years and over this time we have watched it grow from strength to strength. It has transformed the behaviour of our students and we now get very little computer misuse. Securus has helped on numerous occasions to detect and provide early intervention for student safeguarding issues and the evidence is used by our student support department to help provide a safe, caring environment for all students as well as helping us to enforce our acceptable usage policy. Students can learn from their mistakes safely.”

“Securus has been instrumental in safeguarding our students over the past 3 years and alerts us to any misuse on the computer systems. When we implemented Securus, the support engineers spent a lot of time tailoring it to our needs, to ensure we didn’t receive too many ‘false positives’. We have also added our own specific key words to look out for and the Securus is flexible enough to keep up with the constantly changing world and trends. The widespread monitoring on our school system has even surprised our own students.”

“We allow our students to take laptops home, when required outside of school hours. To ensure the continued appropriate use of technology, Securus will monitor off site activity and store it until back on the school network, where any captures can be viewed. Our students are from 13 to 18 years old and they know when they log in to use the ICT suite, that any inappropriate behaviour will be flagged and dealt with, which teaches them to use school technology safely.”

“I have been using Securus now for over five years, and I would recommend it to anybody who has network responsibility and is looking to build on their existing tools, or needs a robust solution. Securus is an integral part of our school network infrastructure, and as vital to me as any other server in the organisation. Securus can be configured to provide other non-technical support professionals with access to support their other activities, and this is very important to get the best out of the system.”

“We have found Securus to be an invaluable tool to help ensure that our pupils’ use of the school’s IT facilities is adequately monitored and when there are concerns it gives us the ability to act quickly to resolve them with clear and accurate evidence. Blocking and filtering of websites is not enough and Securus provides us with an extra layer of protection which is vital to ensuring that we safeguard our pupils in their use of school IT equipment.”

“We were prompted by our investigation into the recent government requirement to investigate the steps that we take to keep children safe from harm online from cyberbullying, pornography and the risk of radicalisation. We felt that Securus offered us the best possible solution in addressing the requirements of ‘Keeping Children Safe in Education’ and the needs of our school.”