Aletheia Anglican Academies Trust can now scale infinitely with their Smoothwall Filter

Aletheia Anglican Academies Trust are a small but growing Trust comprising of six primary schools and one secondary school.

The challenge

The primary schools had historically purchased their web filter as part of a bundled broadband package from their LEA. It was a very basic solution limited to blocklist filtering only, with no content analysis, reporting or flexibility.

The secondary school had chosen to go with a large US-based filtering solution. Categories were not updated as frequently as the Trust would have liked and granular control was proving rigid.

Luke Dobson, is the Trust’s IT Support Lead. He and his three IT coordinators look after seven schools with more coming on stream. It’s a lean function and they needed their new filter solution to be seamless and problem-free.

Luke explains: “We had three priorities. The first and most important was to keep our children safe. The second was flexibility so that as an IT function we could provide a good but efficient digital safety service to our schools. The third was value for money. Our current provision wasn’t ticking any of these boxes. There had to be a better fit for us.”

The solution

The Trust now has a Smoothwall Filter box at every primary school and they are managed centrally within the Secondary school.

The Filter’s tenancy capability allows each school DSL to login and view their own reports. This reduces the workload on Luke’s team. Although they can see them too and can respond quickly to a report request if a DSL is unavailable.