Weekly Brief for Schools
29th June 2015
In this issue:
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Quote of the Week
Website of the Week
Communications
NEN/PSN National
Regional
Service & Technical
e-Safety
Meeting Dates
Meeting Dates
Communications
See below
Quote of the Week
The marvellous richness of human
experience would lose something of
rewarding joy if there were no
limitations to overcome. The hilltop
hour would not be half so wonderful if
there were no dark valleys to traverse.
Helen Keller (1880 - 1968) American
Blind/Deaf Author and Lecturer
Website of the Week
British Council Schools Online
Schools Online is supported by the
British Council to provide you with the
tools and resources to bring the world
into your classroom and encourage
your students to develop as global
LGfl Roadshow Update
Last week’s Roadshows with LGfL TRUSTnet gave delegates an
opportunity to hear about the services available and how they would fit
into their schools, add value and provide some useful additional tools.
Schools who attended felt the range of services and resources
included tools that would be useful for different people around the
school: administrators, technicians, teachers, pupils and parents.
Details of the services can be found on the embc website at
http://www.empsn.info/service_provider/lgfl-trustnet-over-embc/
More events will be held in October: dates and venues to be
confirmed.
NEN/PSN National
A new survey of 632 schools from the British Educational Suppliers
Association (BESA) has found that although the number of tablets
provided by schools is still rising, the growth is not as quick as was
once predicted – especially in secondary schools.
Currently, almost three-quarters of schools now use tablet computers
such as the iPad in lessons, and there are an estimated 721,000
tablets such computers in schools. The association’s report estimates
that in five years’ time, 46 per cent of computers owned by primaries
will be tablets – down from a previous estimate of 48 per cent.
And all of these making increasing demands on the schools WiFi
infrastructure and the capacity of their broadband connection, an often
unplanned cost within the increased tablet numbers, plus the
increasing use of BYOD by pupils, staff and visitors.
citizens. This includes, resources you
can use in the classroom; information
on funding; interaction with like-minded
teaching professionals.
You can also find information about
school exchanges and trips overseas
for developing your partnerships with
schools abroad and introducing
students and staff to new cultures and
languages.
https://schoolsonline.britishcouncil.org/
The JCS Online Resources June 2015 Newsletter for Secondary
Schools and Sixth Form Colleges is now available. As ever at this
time of year there are many offers for the new school year.
The Churchill Archive contains a vast range of original documents for
teachers and students alike - and it is available free of charge to
schools worldwide until 31 December 2020 exclusively through JCS:
a long term service.
https://www.jcsonlineresources.org/catalogue/churchill-archive
Regional
Contact Us
www.empsn.info
01604 879 869
embc@embc.org.uk
The Tackling the East Midlands Challenge conference took place in
Nottingham on 2nd June. The conference reflected on the
development of the school-led improvement system in the region and
to consider how your local partnership arrangements are having an
impact upon priority groups of learners.
The conference resources and presentations are now available online
at www.sectorledimprovement.co.uk/events-and-seminars/past-events
• The keynote speaker presentations, including the John Lewis, RSC,
NCTL, Ofsted and Leicester City DCS
o the embedded video clips in Jo Raisey’s John Lewis presentation
are disabled (too large) – it was an excellent and thought provoking
presentation from the retail sector
• Images of all of the action planning exercises from all 9 mini-regional
areas for all themes are all available
• Ofsted’s interactive regional map of school inspections is also
available. This needs a piece of software call Tableau installing on
your computer – instructions are supplied.
Service & Technical
Summer Upgrades
Detailed plans for the summer upgrade works have been produced
and will be posted today on the KCOM Portal https://portal.kcom.com/documents/ the plans include information
about the service impacts and the periods when work is being
undertaken and when service will be at risk.
More information about the Summer Upgrade will be available in the
coming days. We are preparing an active presentation to give an
overview of the scheme of work, along with some audio, and there will
be technical details of the work, FAQ and customer test plans.
We will update you in the weekly brief.
Workstation Hygiene
Do you know how to check if your computers anti-malware is up-todate? Most anti-malware products will give a clear view on the status
of the health of the software, is it up to date, are there areas for
concern etc. Particularly for school admin workstations and laptops
and in even more so machines accessing financial systems such as
online backing, it is important that your machines are clean and
healthy, as an out of date anti malware product is less effective every
day.
We continue to see a number of cases of Malware and Infection
appearing on the network, some instances appear and disappear the
same day others continue for a period of time. It is important to
maintain current patching levels locally and to run current and up-todate anti-malware products, but these alone are not the complete
answer.
Even the most effective mail filtering solution will allow a small number
of malware messages through as they typically only claim to be
99.??% effective. Malware messages which do get through need to
be filtered by users and people should act with caution for any
messages received from unknown mail addresses. Keep safe and
only open attachments which you are expecting or have been verified.
OPENHIVE
The OPENHIVE teams continue to work on improving service
performance but do not have a planned date for increasing the number
of proxy servers offering the web filtering solution. Dates and further
improvements are expected over the summer holiday period.
Mail filtering services are being improved over the coming week as the
OPENHIVE team perform software upgrades to the servers in the data
centre. While this work takes place the filtering team are also
adjusting the platform resilience following the migration of services to
Office365. Work will take place outside normal working hours and
Capita are advertising that delays might be experienced at times.
Mail filtering has been a focus topic of the service desk in recent
weeks with agents being trained by the vendor in MailMarshal, this is
to improve skills and knowledge enabling more first time fix rates.
Google SSL Searching
As Google makes the switchover to SSL ONLY searches and all
search traffic will become encrypted, you may need to make some
changes to your services to ensure that you are receiving filtered
search results.
We have obtained responses from the following suppliers:
Capita : the OPENHIVE service will continue to work providing SSL
Search and the certificates are installed
Capital Bytes : Capital Bytes moved over from NOSSL in December
2014 so all customers have been using SSL since then. They provide
an SSL inspection and place certificates for devices so that schools
can use the keyword function for Google
RM: last week RM launched their redeveloped SafetyNet to enable
SSL Interception which allows SafetyNet to decrypt, filter and reencrypt Google Search traffic.
If your google search results are not being filtered please contact your
vendor to ask what steps are required to filter the search results. This
may involve some work for you to perform locally, so please check
sooner rather than later.
Summer Firewall Upgrades
The first document detailing the Kcom firewall and switch upgrades
has been published on the Kcom portal at
https://portal.kcom.com/documents/DocumentsView.aspx?DocID=352
Access to the site requires your username and password obtained
from Kcom by completing the online form http://www.kcom.com/empsnorders/ if you don’t already have one.
Further documents and videos will be published on the KCOM portal
over the following days and news about these will be posted on the
emPSN website at http://www.empsn.info/news/sevice-updates/
The latest news will continue to be provided in the weekly brief and
embc newsletter.
e-Safety
Ofcom
This recent Ofcom study may be of interest from an esafety/safeguarding perspective:
http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/market-data-research/other/researchpublications/childrens/childrens-media-lives-year1/
Section 10 of the main report covers children's understanding of risk in
an online context and section 11 considers parents' approaches to
safeguarding and enabling.
Extremism Prevention
Schools are increasingly seen as being on the front-lines of the battle
to prevent extremism. Their duty to prevent extremism has now been
enshrined in law in Section 26 of the 2015 Counter-Terrorism and
Security Act which comes into force on July 1st, and which requires
that schools have “due regard to the need to prevent people from
being drawn into terrorism”. A guide from RadicalisationResearch.Org
based at Lancaster University outlines some of the duties in the act,
the debates around what this means in practice and links to some
further resources available to teachers, school management and
governors. The guide doesn’t constitute legal advice and exists for
information only, but it is a good overview starting point.
http://www.radicalisationresearch.org/
Meeting Dates
emPSN Board Meeting 13th July 2015
Local Authorities: