Networks & Security in Dundee

What is different about networks & security in Dundee

Schools and colleges across Dundee and Tayside carry an obligation that ordinary businesses do not: filtering and monitoring are part of safeguarding, not an IT preference, and the record of what was seen and who reviewed it matters as much as the blocking itself. The technical side is well understood; the part that gets missed is agreeing who actually looks at the reports and how often.

The other local pattern is a site with far more devices than staff. A school network carries hundreds of pupil devices that nobody in the building controls, which makes separating pupil, staff and admin traffic the foundation rather than an enhancement. Admin and finance systems should not be reachable from the network a year group is on.

Questions we get asked in Dundee

We have filtering already. Is that enough for safeguarding?

Filtering is half of it. The other half is monitoring and the record — being able to show what was flagged, who reviewed it and what happened next. That is usually the gap when it is examined, and it is a process question rather than a product one. Agree who reviews the reports before you need to answer for them.

How should pupil and admin systems be separated?

Onto genuinely different networks, so nothing on the pupil side can reach the admin or finance systems at all. Hundreds of personal and school devices are effectively uncontrolled, and treating them as trusted is the assumption worth removing. It also makes the safeguarding filtering easier to apply to the right group.