Ensuring your school has a reliable and effective broadband connection is vital if you're planning on implementing or improving your digital learning capabilities, but it's important that your internet connection protects children online.
Read on to learn how Smarter Interactive has helped a Dorset primary school to improve their digital learning capabilities by implementing a KCSiE-compliant broadband solution.
Teachers at a Church of England primary school in Devon would prepare Key Stage 1 and 2 class lessons that included online resources as part of the learning experience, only to suffer from the “Monday morning Broadband Blues”. They regularly found that their internet experience was so unreliable that they would either abandon (at worst) or delay (at best) the online portion of the lesson until each class member had the chance to log in to their excruciatingly slow internet. This had the knock-on effect of making the lesson inefficient, and also disillusioned the teachers who felt they’d wasted their time preparing the lessons in their own spare time.
The school approached Smarter Interactive to see if they could improve the school's digital learning capabilities. Whilst improving the reliability and speed of the internet was a vital requirement, an equally important objective was ensuring that the school's pupils remained safe from malicious and harmful resources available online. Smarter Interactive proposed its SafeLINK broadband solution that specifically addressed both of these requirements.
Smarter Interactive’s KCSiE-compliant SafeLINK broadband service links the school directly into Smarter Interactive's secure WAN, and provides a private and resilient connection to the internet. The connection is remotely monitored for availability and performance, and provides appropriate filtering and monitoring across over 80 categories of protection. Proactive monitoring by Smarter Interactive ensures that if the broadband service “goes down” for any reason, the Smarter Interactive technical support centre will contact the school to check for local reasons such as power failures, and also liaise with service providers to re-establish service in good time.
Faster internet speeds now mean that teachers can use online resources effectively as part of their lesson plans when it’s appropriate for the learning experience, not just “when they can”. This has helped to encourage collaboration, teamwork and experience working with digital tools across the school's classrooms, and has provided a reliable backbone for new technologies such as interactive whiteboards and tablets.
With SafeLINK, the school complies with Article 67 of the KCSiE regulation that states that “Children are safeguarded from potentially harmful and inappropriate online material”, whilst saving almost 20% of the costs associated with the school's previous broadband provider.
To find out more about how SafeLINK works to improve your internet speed, protect your pupils online and reduce your internet costs, contact the experts at Smarter Interactive today or visit our broadband page by clicking on the button below.
Keep up-to-date with Smarter Interactive
Subscribe to our content hub to receive the latest blogs, news articles, events and videos from our education experts and partners.
