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.
Ensures 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

Discovery Schools Academies Trust

Discovery is a well established and high-performing Multi Academy Trust with 13 primary schools and 2 SEND schools across Leicestershire, all working together & collaborating to provide an outstanding education for children to achieve their full potential.

Safeguarding and a commitment to create a safe and secure environment is a priority. Robust child protection policies and procedures are in place for each individual school based upon guidance provided at Trust level.

Benefits

Key benefits of having a fully managed service:

A monitoring solution with the ability to “whitelist” specific safe websites.
Non typed content is monitored with Securus OCR technology within all applications & browsers.
ALL devices are monitored across all 15 school sites.
Each school within the Trust independently monitors daily activity to act immediately to incidents.
Ability to integrate with CPOMS.
Remote training carried out for all school staff.

Testimonial

Having Securus in place is vital to keep both pupils and staff safe across all our schools in the Trust. The ability to configure the software to our specific needs with detailed alerts & reporting provides us with key evidence of any safeguarding concerns that arise. The team are always on hand for any support we require.

Adam Lapidge, Trust Online Safety Lead

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 of having a fully managed service:

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’s 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

“ Securus is an easy to use, one stop shop method of monitoring activity. It allows me to check weekly, quickly and easily and most importantly, reliably. ”

“ At Northleigh House School we provide a safe learning environment for vulnerable secondary aged children suffering from anxiety. We are dedicated to the safety and wellbeing of all our students and Securus is in place to monitor our Windows laptop devices, highlighting any incidents of concern taking place on the school network and providing staff with hard evidence and key protection to safeguard our children ”

“ 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. Securus has helped to detect 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 use policy ”

“ Securus has been instrumental in safeguarding our students over the past years and alerts us to any misuse on the computer systems. 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. 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. Securus is an integral part of our school network infrastructure and can be configured to provide other non-technical support professionals with access to support their other activities, 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 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 ”

“ I was sat in a School Governor meeting and hearing great feedback on the Securus Software that is installed at our school! Thanks for providing a fantastically secure and intelligent software to keep our children safe ”

“ We are one of the largest primary schools in Leicester with children from 3 to 11 years of age. Safeguarding our pupils is paramount and therefore having Securus in place gives us a better insight into what is happening on the network. We encourage our pupils to develop moral and social behaviours, so by monitoring their activity we can detect any instances that occur on the school devices and take appropriate action ”

“ Securus has taken safeguarding to the next level here at The Gilberd School. We can quickly identify any threats to our students and deal with these in a timely manner. Support has been exceptional, especially helping us migrate our on-premise solution to their recently released cloud solution. The ability to share this “capture” information in an easy to navigate portal for other staff such as DLS and Senior Team has also made our monitoring very efficient ”

“ It's easy to manage Securus, as the server has been set up on the cloud and this means all updates are taken care of, leaving us to monitor. We check Securus daily as the quantity of captures is between 30-50 per day and therefore easy to manage. If a serious incident is captured it will be reported to the head of year, who will then take action ”

“ As a Head, Secures gave me confidence that access to unsuitable material on the internet was not being locked (as kids know how to get round blocking systems ) but monitored and detected swiftly. The result was that the 450 boarders who had internet access from 7.00 am to 10.00 pm knew that they could access such material, but did not do so as they knew there would be consequences.... A genuine example of software which educates children ”

“ Securus dovetails seamlessly with modern technology like Google Chromebooks and iPADs providing cutting edge monitoring of pupils activity, whilst on the network, searching the web. The product simply sells itself, it is literally a no brainer. What I can add is this, Securus also delivers, supports and continues to evolve its incredible innovation. I genuinely cannot ever see us not using this invaluable resource ”

“ My feedback is simple – the service saves me potentially hours of additional work & is very cost effective. I am very happy with the service and do not have anything that I think should be changed or improved!In a nutshell – perfect ”

“ The Securus Full Monitoring service has without doubt made our job far easier than it was previously and more importantly has enabled us to identify more concerns than we ever had before. Gone are the days where our IT technicians had to identify risky behaviour by our students online. Having Securus gives peace of mind to the designated safeguarding team, which is particularly important at a time when we have loaned out over 300 laptops to students during remote learning. I would recommend this service to any school without hesitation ”

“ The Full Monitoring Service definately saves you time. It Is very cost effective, allowing senior leaders to focus on other matters but also to deal with screen captures quickly and objectively as they come about. We are really happy with the service; it has really helped with our safeguarding of pupils ”

“ FMS saves a huge amount of time. To do this job effectively in-house, we would need a percentage of a Technician time set a-side. We don’t have enough as it is, so you are well worth the money! Very happy with the service. I like the fact that lines of communication are always open, and always honest. I cannot think of anything that could improve the service at the moment ”