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Education Case Studies

Havering Sixth Form College saves over £10,000 with Lightspeed Systems

Schools, colleges and universities are becoming increasingly reliant on IT but as a consequence they are spending an escalating amount of time and money on security solutions to protect both the students and the institution from a number of threats including viruses, spam and unsuitable web content.

Historically, Havering Sixth Form College has addressed these threats by using a range of disparate security solutions from a number of different suppliers. However, since opening in 2001, the college has doubled in size to over 2000 students and found that these different solutions were becoming costly to operate and very difficult to manage.

Pat McConalogue, Head of IT at Havering Sixth Form College, comments, "With the use of disparate, incompatible solutions, we could not get a clear view of network activity. Each summary report was presented in a different format and would often be limited in the information it provided, extra work was then required by the IT team to interpret and correlate this data. Furthermore, using a number of different solutions was proving to be unnecessarily expensive. TTC has enabled us to save not only a huge amount of man hours across the IT team but an estimated £10,000 by consolidating products."

Since deploying TTC Havering has already gained an invaluable insight into its network activity. The College found that over 80% of its past email was spam which is now blocked by TTC. This discovery alone has freed up a significant amount of the IT staff's time and enables them to focus on more strategic work.

Neil Siveter, Senior IT Technician at Havering Sixth Form College, confirms, "TTC now provides a number of comprehensive reports detailing the amount of spam and viruses it has blocked and detected, this now gives us a full view of the network activity from a single source."

St Mary's School - 100 Year old school takes modern action against online threats

St Mary's School in Wiltshire has implemented Lightspeed Systems Europe's flagship product Total Traffic Control (TTC) to protect their girls from online bullying and unsuitable internet sites. With the wide use of the internet by pupils within schools, education authorities are having to take action to protect their pupils from unsuitable internet sites and the emergence of online bullying. St Mary's School, Calne, Wiltshire has tackled this escalating problem by heightening their network security measures with TTC, to monitor, control and secure both their internal wireless networks and internet connections.

Both a boarding school and day school of around 300 girls aged 11-18 St Mary's School was founded in 1873 and still treasures its traditional values, which complement the modern curriculum they follow developing successful young women for the 21st century. The curriculum now welcomes the use of the internet as a modern research technique, but with the vast amount of uncontrolled information available to its users, schools need to implement a huge amount of security measures to protect their pupils. Furthermore, with the emergence of instant messaging and social networking sites such as MSN Messenger and MySpace, online bullying is becoming increasingly perceptible, adding to the threats surrounding the internet.

With the use of laptops by the pupils who board at St Mary's, online bullying was a threat the school did not want to see becoming endemic. Therefore TTC was added to their existing security measures in order to enable each individual user to be monitored and protected from such threats with the use of content filtering. Matthew Rus, IT Manager at St Mary's school comments "With the ever increasing use of laptops and wireless networks by the pupils, we as a school have an obligation to protect the girls from harm; whether it's the use of unsuitable sites or online bullying. With the implementation of TTC we can achieve this."

Matthew adds, "TTC not only enables us to monitor the sites accessed across our network but allows us to monitor individual users. As well as being able to set limits according to each different user, we can stipulate the time they can access the internet and indeed what they can access."Earnie Kramer, Technical Director, Lightspeed Systems "Students are now using the internet as a source of communication rather than just a research tool which adds a number of new security threats. We are delighted to be able to offer TTC to schools such as St Mary's in order to help combat these threats and provide a safe, flexible educational environment."

Dauntsey’s School imposes Internet control with Lightspeed Systems

With an increasing proportion of the National Curriculum requiring Internet access during lessons, many schools are struggling to impose control over pupils’ in-lesson activity. From access to inappropriate web sites to IM led distraction, maintaining focus and discipline is a growing problem.

Dauntsey's, which is located near Devizes in Wiltshire, was founded in 1542 and is one of the most popular fully coeducational schools in the country, with some 770 boys and girls, aged between 11 and 18.

The school provides Internet access during school hours to support teaching activity and has just completed the roll-out of a network across all four boarding houses to provide pupils with Internet access in their rooms. Mark Braby, Network Administrator, comments, “Obviously while it is very important for pupils to use the Internet to support the teaching process, the school has to be very careful about controlling access to specific content. As with any school, Dauntsey’s has pupils who wish to push the boundaries – it is essential to be able to monitor and control that activity."

The school has developed an Internet policy to cover all pupils from 11 to 18. However, pupils can make requests for access to specific sites and each request is then considered on its merits. As Braby explains, “The sixth form has its own study area that is not accessed by younger pupils. At their request, Dauntsey’s has allowed access to Facebook for these pupils."

However, this policy can only be sustained if the school has a strong, reliable content filtering tool. In the past, Dauntsey’s used a product that on occasions failed to provide a consistent service. Initially the school was using Total Traffic Control from Lightspeed Systems only as its firewall. “Lightspeed Systems demonstrated the latest version of Total Traffic Control which delivers the full range of monitoring, control, virus protection and content filtering," Braby says. “Furthermore, with a strong pedigree in the education marketplace, Lightspeed Systems maintains far more detailed and robust website categorisation, which is essential within a school."

Dauntsey’s is now using Total Traffic Control to monitor, control and secure its internal network and Internet connection and plans to utilise the tool’s email filtering and spam protection in the near future. Braby adds, “By using a single product to handle the whole range of Internet security issues, Dauntsey’s can reduce its IT management overheads and realise significant savings."

Critically, Total Traffic Control offers the level of reliability and control demanded by schools and expected by parents. “Parents are concerned about the amount of time spent by pupils online. With Internet browsing in the boarding houses, access is now tightly controlled. For example, the Internet will only be available until a time that’s considered appropriate in the evenings". Total Traffic Control also offers very detailed site categorisation, enabling the school to impose stringent controls over pupils’ access to a range of sites, including those offering a ‘cut and paste’ solution to homework. Braby comments that “with Total Traffic Control, Dauntsey’s does not need to police pupils’ online behaviour every hour.

The depth and accuracy of site categorisation provided by Lightspeed Systems is excellent and, using reports, the school has immediate visibility of any attempt by a pupil to access an inappropriate site. The reports also show trends in Internet use and behaviour which is very useful, especially for the school’s management team."

The depth and accuracy of site categorisation provided by Lightspeed Systems is excellent and, using reports, the school has immediate visibility of any attempt by a pupil to access an inappropriate site. The reports also show trends in Internet use and behaviour which is very useful, especially for the school’s management team."