St Paul’s School for Girls – Smoothwall Monitor (Managed Service) Case Study

What’s the background?

St Paul’s is a Catholic comprehensive school for girls aged 11-18 years. Founded in 1908 and based in Birmingham, St Paul’s has recently been recognised as Outstanding by Ofsted.

James is the school’s Strategic ICT Network Manager and is responsible for the running of all IT based systems and their implementation and development. Anne Marie is the school’s Assistant Head Teacher, Pastoral Care and Designated Safeguarding Lead (DSL).

What was the challenge?

James explained their requirements, “it was important to find a monitoring solution that accurately assessed content in context, rather than just picking up on a list of words or phrases. It was also vital that should anything severe be identified, there is a fast turnaround of reporting in place to allow us to take action. Finally, the solution should be compliant with the Prevent duty.”

James went onto discuss the reason for installing Smoothwall Monitor – Managed Service, “once we saw [it] in action, we realised it would be another way for us to uphold the school’s ethos of ‘Do your very best for the children’.”

James continued, “Smoothwall Monitor is far ahead from a technical viewpoint and this would result in greatly reducing staff time spent searching, identifying and then taking action on anything that did come to light.”

How Smoothwall helped

Anne Marie explained the school’s experience of Smoothwall Monitor – Managed Service, “the major problem with our previous solution was the time delay between events occurring and then being acted on. This has decreased dramatically since Smoothwall was brought in.”

Discussing the alerting procedure, Anne Marie commented: “we’ve not received any high-level alerts to date, but the issues that have been highlighted have been dealt with effectively, through contact with parents and speaking to the pupils.”

James went onto discuss the positive impact Smoothwall Monitor has had on his workload, “a major benefit is that I’m no longer spending several hours each week trawling through endless false positives, both in terms of my workload and sanity!”

Explaining the installation process, James commented “the support team were very knowledgeable of the product even though it was new! They helped us identify that the required Windows update was not installed on all of our Windows 7 computers. Once this was resolved, Smoothwall Monitor was installed on all computers without any issues.”

To summarise, Anne Marie commented, “it’s reassuring knowing that when I go home each evening there aren’t any issues that require prompt attention as the Smoothwall team would have already informed us.”