We’re in the final sprint of the upgrade with the last few schools to go!Â
By the end of the month every school across the country will have a smarter and safer internet connection. We recently visited a few schools to see how they’re getting on after the upgrade. Here’s what some had to say.
As a teacher and working in a boys school, with big classes, you have to be confident there is a system in place that doesn’t require any additional work, that just operates in the background. This means I can focus on what I’m doing in the classroom – what’s being taught – and not on the actual infrastructure of the IT.
Rhian Elmes, Head of Arts Faculty, Tauranga Boys College
The filtering for me is a hugely important part, because it’s a bit of a moving beast with the internet. It’s great having the different levels of filtering that you can have when the children are younger. You can have more of a locked down approach and then moving towards more independence before they get off to college where they do obviously have to monitor their own use of it, because things are a lot more open out in the big bad world.
Rachael Laming. Year 7 and 8 Teacher, Seatoun School
But our work isn’t done. Running the country’s largest Managed Network with more than 825,000 people using our services every day, means there is always plenty of work to do!
Every month schools are using more internet. And the frequency and types of malware attempting to infect school internet connections also increases.
In May alone we blocked more than 4 million security threats, such as viruses and malware, from the network and stopped more than 399 million attempts to access inappropriate websites. Technology is not a silver bullet and sometimes nasty threats get through, and when they do, we’re here to help mitigate the impact for schools.
With the help of our amazing partners (Spark, Fortinet and local tech companies), we visited every school using our internet services to swap out their routers, and applied new filtering settings to better protect against online threats. The new hardware also means schools have easier access to more bandwidth when needed.
The nationwide rollout of our new hardware has equipped 2400-plus schools with more reliable internet connectivity that comes with built-in safety and security features. It’s all about helping schools make the most of their internet connections.
On average, we upgraded around 200 schools every month since the rollout began in August last year. We anticipate the rollout to be completed by June 30.