TECHNOLOGY FOR EDUCATION
When Schools Need It Most
Half past eight, and four people can’t log in. Half past three, and everyone who has been teaching all day sits down to do their admin at once.
Those are the moments when school technology gets tested. They happen every day of term.
iNREACH supplies print, phone systems and IT to around 150 schools, academies and colleges, and has done since 1998.
Every Setting
From a small nursery to a large college.
A nursery and a large college need very different things, and most schools sit somewhere between the two.
Print does most of the heavy lifting. Schools get through a lot of it, and rarely at a steady rate, so the machines have to cope with everything landing at once.
Phone systems matter almost as much, with a handset in reception, the staff room and usually every classroom. IT support sits behind both, and audio visual comes up where a school needs it.
Equipment gets chosen for where it’s going to live. A machine in a central print room, one in a corridor and one in the school office aren’t doing the same job in the same conditions. Specify them as though they were, and you end up with equipment that keeps failing.
Scheduling
Work that happens in the holidays.
Installations get scheduled around your calendar, not ours. Half term and end of term, or whatever window causes you the least disruption.
The same goes for preventative maintenance. Machines that have sat unused for most of the summer are more likely to give trouble in the first week back than at any other point. It’s worth getting them checked before staff return, not after the problems start.
Book it in advance and it’s dealt with before anyone notices. That’s easier for everyone than an engineer trying to work around a corridor full of children.
Safeguarding
Everyone who visits your site is DBS checked.
Anyone from iNREACH likely to set foot on your site is DBS checked, and that means everyone. Sales, service, support and installation, not only the engineers.
Most schools need a standard check, and where a setting calls for enhanced, that’s what the people coming in have.
In some settings a DBS check on its own isn’t enough. In special schools there are areas visitors can’t access while children are present, whatever checks they’ve had. The work happens later in the day instead, or at weekends, or in half term.
We’d rather plan around that than turn up and find we can’t do the job.
Budgets
Proving you’re getting a fair deal.
Cost decides most of these decisions. In a school it also has to be defensible, because somebody will ask why you chose who you chose, and a gut feeling isn’t much of an answer.
We will look at what you’re spending now and tell you what it should cost. If money comes off your print or comms spend, that is budget you can put somewhere it’s needed more.
Multi-academy trusts
Multi-academy trusts and school groups.
Nobody expects a trust to move every school at once, and we would not ask you to. We take on the schools where it makes sense, on terms that suit each one, and the trust gets a single point of contact for all of them.
Where a school sits a long way from us and needs somebody on site quickly, a supplier closer to it will serve that school better. We will say so rather than bid for it.
Business mobile works the same way, with usage pooled across the MAT instead of billed school by school. See our Business Mobile page.
Procurement
Colleges, universities and tendered work.
Buying at this level usually runs through procurement, and often alongside a preferred supplier agreement already in place with a manufacturer.
Those agreements do not stop you testing what else is out there. If you put print, comms or IT out to tender, we will price against them properly instead of assuming the answer is already settled.
Tell us when something is going out and we will respond.
Filtering & monitoring
Filtering and monitoring.
Keeping children away from harmful material online is a statutory duty, and the standards it gets measured against are set out in Keeping Children Safe in Education.
Filtering and monitoring in line with those standards comes as part of our support rather than as a separate product to buy or a bolt-on to negotiate.
Security
Keeping pupil and staff data secure.
Pupil records, staff files, and everything else that passes through the school office. None of it sits in one place.
Some is on a printer in a corridor, some in a system the office uses every day, and most of it somewhere in the cloud. Covering all three is easier when the same people look after all three.
Cyber security
Email security, awareness training, patching and dark web monitoring, with immediate escalation to senior support. Cyber Security
Backups
Monitored, and tested to confirm they actually restore. Cloud Managed Services
No obligation
Find out where you stand, free.
Three checks we’ll run without you being a client. No cost, no obligation, and the results are yours whatever you decide to do next.
Dark web report
Shows where your school’s email addresses and domains have turned up.
Dark web report
Shows where your school’s email addresses and domains have turned up.
Support
Who picks up.
Calls come into our office and are answered by our own team. At half eight in the morning, that matters more than a ticket reference.
Everything starts with phone and remote support, and most problems get sorted that way. Passwords that have stopped working. A machine that won’t start. Print quality gone off, or a line that won’t dial out. Ordinary things, and the things that stop somebody teaching.
Where a problem can’t be sorted remotely, an engineer comes out carrying the parts most likely to be needed. Service contracts cover all parts, all labour and all call-outs. There’s more on the Printer Support page.
