Aletheia Anglican Academies Trust are a small but growing Trust comprising of six primary schools and one secondary school.
The primary schools had historically purchased their web filter as part of a bundled broadband package from their LEA. It was a very basic solution limited to blocklist filtering only, with no content analysis, reporting or flexibility.
The secondary school had chosen to go with a large US-based filtering solution. Categories were not updated as frequently as the Trust would have liked and granular control was proving rigid.
Luke Dobson, is the Trust’s IT Support Lead. He and his three IT coordinators look after seven schools with more coming on stream. It’s a lean function and they needed their new filter solution to be seamless and problem-free.
Luke explains: “We had three priorities. The first and most important was to keep our children safe. The second was flexibility so that as an IT function we could provide a good but efficient digital safety service to our schools. The third was value for money. Our current provision wasn’t ticking any of these boxes. There had to be a better fit for us.”
The Trust now has a Smoothwall Filter box at every primary school and they are managed centrally within the Secondary school.
The Filter’s tenancy capability allows each school DSL to login and view their own reports. This reduces the workload on Luke’s team. Although they can see them too and can respond quickly to a report request if a DSL is unavailable.
Said Luke: “Our Smoothwall Filter helps us to work as a team. And the tenancy capability means we can scale infinitely.”
But the benefits don’t end there.
By forgoing their former Filter provider, and with the hardwork of the Smoothwall team, Luke and his colleagues were able to secure their new premium filter at an affordable price – an important consideration for a growing Trust.
Luke continues: “We have a new school joining us shortly and they were thrilled that we were able to offer them premium safeguard filtering that was affordable. It’s an important selling point for our Trust.”
Asked to sum up what he loves most about Smoothwall, Luke is emphatic.
“Smoothwall is a UK company expert in UK education. They also understand the needs of multi-academy trusts. It shows in their excellent Filter and excellent support. I can’t praise them enough. A truly great team of people.”
For Aletheia Anglican Academies Trust Smoothwall Filter provides a solution that is: