Security should always form a significant part of your agenda when thinking about budgets and making your school environment as safe as it can be. In light of the importance of safety, we have selected a few key questions that we suggest become part of your checklist when improving security.
Who can enter what parts of your building?
At a bare minimum, you should have a secure Door Entry System on at least the main entrances and exits of your school. These prevent unchecked visitors entering the building, enable staff to safely enter and exit the school, and also help keep your students on the playground at break times (and not free to run loose around school)!
What about for all of those rooms that require a single key that is constantly misplaced, or difficult to find? Or for those keys that need a staff member to spend valuable time collecting them from the office? Time is precious, and replacing keys gets expensive so there needs to be an affordable solution to overcome this problem. Key fobs with zoned access control ensure all staff can enter the building, and only certain members of staff have access to any restricted parts of the building. The added benefit of key fobs is that they are electronically controlled – in the case of a misplaced or lost fob, there is no breach of security for your school as they can simply be cancelled.
Find out more about the benefits of electronic Door Entry, and the solution that Computer Talk recommend here.
Who is entering your building, and how do you record this data?
Gone are the days when a school has a reception solely dedicated to visitor management. There simply isn’t the money in the budget or the time in the day to manage this. That’s why electronic Visitor Management is a suitable alternative for schools. At a fraction of the cost of an additional member of staff, not only will it save money, but it also improves administration and efficiency due to the automatic database integration.
Paper recordings of visitors that have to be manually transferred onto your internal database are no more! In its place, the electronic system records the data of your visitors, including the frequency and dates of their visits, DBS checked status, reason for entry, and other useful information. The system can integrate with your MIS to provide you with automatically up-to-date data for your records, (and that’s a huge tick in the Ofsted box). What’s more, the visitor management software that we recommend can notify staff of visitor arrivals so they can meet and greet them when they arrive.
Read more about the state-of-the-art visitor and pupil management software.
Are you proactively filtering and monitoring the use of technology?
Online safety is equally as important as physical safety due to the way children perceive the internet as an integral part of their lives. Filtering internet pages is no longer substantial enough to constitute as online safety and safeguarding. Monitoring the use of technology forms an essential part of safeguarding in order to protect your students. Beyond keeping students safe, it is also a way to help teach students how to use technology to their advantage, in a safe and responsible way.
It’s not just about online threats here, but this type of monitoring extends to combating bullying and providing a platform to support your students with any personal matters you may not have otherwise been aware of.
For information on monitoring software, click here. Don’t forget: online safety forms an essential part of school security.
How do you protect your valuable resources against criminal behaviour?
With more and better technology being worth an increasing amount of money, schools are readily becoming the target of gang related burglaries and crime. With the resources in schools being a lucrative target, high quality CCTV systems can be the difference between deterring or detaining a criminal in order to prosecute and recover goods, and not being clearly able to identify a perpetrator resulting in the loss of hundreds of thousands of pounds of equipment.
CCTV systems cost less than you might think, especially when they could end up saving you time and money in the long run. We firmly believe that IP CCTV is the best solution designed to be simply manageable, easily expandable and efficient.
Read more to find out about our recommended CCTV solution.
There are so many questions and considerations at play when ensuring your school is secure, but we believe that these are a good place to start to address a few of your concerns. If you have any other questions you may want answering, feel free to email marketing@computertalk.co.uk and we’ll do our best to answer them.