IT Support for Schools: What You Need and What You Don't
10 September 2026 · By Ethan Fernandes
Schools need safeguarding-compliant filtering, device fleet management, and classroom platform support. Here is what actually matters and what you can skip.
Schools need IT that keeps children safe online, keeps devices working for lessons, and does not require a full-time technician to maintain. The non-negotiable is safeguarding compliance — everything else builds on that foundation.
Here is what schools actually need from their IT, and what you can safely deprioritise.
1. Safeguarding and Content Filtering Come First
Keeping Children Safe in Education (KCSIE) requires schools to have "appropriate filters and monitoring systems in place" for any device or network children use. This is not optional and it is not vague — Ofsted will ask about it, and the DfE's filtering and monitoring standards set out exactly what is expected.
Your filtering solution needs to block harmful content across all devices on the school network (and ideally on school-owned devices taken home), log access attempts, and flag concerning searches to your designated safeguarding lead. It also needs to be manageable — teachers should not be constantly battling false positives that block legitimate educational content.
The DfE's Filtering and Monitoring Standards (updated 2024) specify four categories: meeting the standard, approach, capability, and strategy. Schools must meet all four. Your IT provider should be able to demonstrate compliance against each one.
2. Google Classroom vs Microsoft 365 Education
Most schools have committed to one platform or the other. Both work well, but the choice affects everything — device strategy, staff training, collaboration tools, and admin systems.
Google Workspace for Education pairs naturally with Chromebooks. It is simple to manage, hard for students to break, and the admin console gives you strong control over what students can access. If your school runs a Chromebook fleet, Google Classroom is the obvious choice.
Microsoft 365 Education gives you Teams, SharePoint, and the full Office suite. It pairs better with Windows devices and is often the choice for secondary schools and multi-academy trusts that need more complex administration. The trade-off is that it requires more configuration and management.
What matters more than which platform you choose is that it is properly configured, staff are trained to use it, and someone is managing it ongoing.
3. Device Fleet Management
Whether you are running 30 Chromebooks or 300 Windows laptops, managing devices at scale requires proper tooling. Manually setting up each device, installing updates one by one, and walking around fixing individual machines is not sustainable.
For Chromebooks, Google Admin Console handles deployment, policy enforcement, and remote management. For Windows devices, Microsoft Intune or a similar MDM platform lets you push updates, enforce security policies, and remotely wipe lost or stolen devices. The goal is zero-touch deployment — a new device should be ready for use within minutes, not hours.
4. SEND Accessibility
Schools have a duty to make technology accessible for students with special educational needs and disabilities. This means configuring accessibility features on devices (screen readers, text-to-speech, high contrast modes, alternative input methods), ensuring your learning platforms work with assistive technology, and having the IT knowledge to support specific accessibility needs as they arise.
Both Google and Microsoft include strong accessibility tools in their education suites — Immersive Reader in Microsoft, Read Aloud in Google Docs — but they need to be switched on and staff need to know they exist.
5. Staff Training and Confidence
The best IT setup in the world is useless if teachers cannot use it. Staff training is not a one-off event — it needs to be ongoing, practical, and focused on what teachers actually use in lessons. A 30-minute session on "how to use the interactive whiteboard" is worth more than a full-day course on IT theory.
Your IT support should include regular, informal training — not just break-fix support. When a teacher asks "how do I share my screen in Teams?", they need an answer in minutes, not a ticket that gets resolved next week.
What most schools get wrong: Buying devices without a plan for managing them. We see schools that received hundreds of laptops through the DfE device programme but never set up proper management — so now they have devices with no updates, no security policies, and no way to track where they are.
What You Probably Do Not Need
Schools do not need enterprise-grade server rooms, complex on-premise infrastructure, or the most expensive devices on the market. A well-configured cloud setup (Google or Microsoft) with properly managed Chromebooks or Windows laptops covers most needs. The money you save on hardware should go into proper management, filtering, and staff support.
Key takeaway: Schools need three things from their IT: safeguarding-compliant filtering that meets DfE standards, a managed device fleet that does not eat up all your technician's time, and a classroom platform that staff actually know how to use. Get these right and everything else follows.
We support schools across London with education-focused IT, from safeguarding compliance and Chromebook fleet management to Google Classroom setup and staff training. If your current IT is causing more problems than it solves, let us have a look.
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