St Andrew’s Cathedral School is a multi-campus, independent Anglican co-educational comprehensive and specialist primary and secondary day school, located in Sydney’s CBD.
The school educates about 1,450 students from Kindergarten to Year 12.
The challenge
As a progressive city school, St Andrew’s puts technology at the centre of the student experience. For many years, the school’s IT team had run a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policy, which let students work on their own device, on campus or remotely. Many students used iPads, bringing the fleet to about 1,200 devices.
The BYOD policy helped the school move to more digital ways of learning at first. But it started to cause significant problems for the IT department. With no consistent platform or set of applications across devices, it was very hard for teachers to deliver quality digital learning consistently.
It had also become extremely difficult for the IT team to secure these different devices against cyber-attack, as they connected to the school’s Wi-Fi and to home networks every day. The school also couldn’t control which applications and websites students used during school time, or after hours while unsupervised. As a result, students were getting distracted by their personal devices in class.
Deciding it was time for a new device strategy, the school turned to SureDeploy.
The solution
The SureDeploy team worked closely with St Andrew’s to understand its objectives and requirements.
The first step was an in-depth proof of concept. St Andrew’s trialled devices from five hardware partners with a small group of students: Microsoft, Lenovo, Toshiba, Dell and HPE. Combining feedback from this trial with more traditional evaluation data, the team found the Microsoft Surface range best suited the school’s needs. As the school already used the Microsoft platform, Intune and Surface were a logical fit.
Next came a six-month pilot, with Surface devices given to 120 students to test how effective and manageable they were.
After the pilot’s success, the school used SureDeploy’s endpoint management solution for Intune to roll out devices to the entire student body. The roll-out took four weeks over the Christmas holidays. When students returned for the new school year, they walked into their classroom, picked up their new laptop, logged in and got started straight away.
With SureDeploy, St Andrew’s can now make sure that:
- All of the school’s applications are updated, tested and rolled out automatically, without disruption to users or the IT team.
- Deploying and maintaining devices is simple, which takes pressure off the existing IT team.
- Students can easily swap, upgrade or replace a device at any time.
- Security is robust, regularly updated and penetration tested every year.
- Students never lose an assignment, with global auto-save to the cloud every three minutes.
The student body pays for the SureDeploy device package every quarter. This covers the device lease, software, support, security and ongoing monitoring. SureDeploy is also working with St Andrew’s on a Student Safety program, with applications that give parents and carers visibility of, and control over, their child’s online activity on the school-managed device.
The results
The move from a mix of personal devices under BYOD to a single Surface strategy with SureDeploy has been extremely successful.
St Andrew’s now has a professional, streamlined device management process, and has regained security and control over its network without adding IT staff. After the success of this first roll-out, the school is moving ahead with a second phase to give teachers and office staff Intune-managed devices through SureDeploy.
The entire fleet can be updated remotely almost immediately, and the IT team can rest easy knowing security vulnerabilities are constantly monitored and automatically fixed.
If a device has a problem, it can be swapped for a spare on the spot, without the student losing any of their cloud-based files or settings.
The school also has fine-grained control over which applications students can download and use. Younger students, for example, can’t access the internet after a set time in the evening.
When COVID forced the school into remote learning, the new device strategy was a lifesaver, and left the school well ahead of most others. During lockdown, SureDeploy was also used to roll out Microsoft Teams to every device, securely, within 24 hours.
Updating a single device used to take the IT team about half a day. They can now roll out hundreds of devices in the same time.
“SureDeploy has enabled us to keep our IT team the same size. Even though we’ve added 1,400 laptops to our environment, we haven’t had to add any new IT staff. That says it all.”Lyle Corvisy, Head of IT, St Andrew’s Cathedral School
“This was the smoothest IT roll-out we have ever had at the school – the disruption to students’ learning and the teaching experience was absolutely minimal, and we now have very consistent, modern and easy to manage devices, applications and security. Gone are the days of troubleshooting for several hours. SureDeploy is part of our landscape now. It’s completely embedded.”Lyle Corvisy, Head of IT, St Andrew’s Cathedral School
“SureDeploy has been an incredibly valuable solution from the outset, and the support we have received through our implementation has been second-to-none.”Lyle Corvisy, Head of IT, St Andrew’s Cathedral School