Education Today Education Today Magazine
One of the UK’s leading, all-boarding schools for girls aged 11 to 18 years, Heathfield School is set within 36 acres of grounds in Ascot, Berkshire. Founded in 1899 by its first headmistress, Miss Eleanor Wyatt, Heathfield merged with fellow girls’ school, St Mary’s Wantage in 2006 to create a combined school which encourages self-reliance, values and kindness and aims to give girls the skills and confidence necessary to succeed in the 21st century job market.
The provision of IT is at the core of this aim as Martin Taylor, Director of IT at Heathfield School explains: “At Heathfield School, our objective is to provide the ideal environment for our staff and students. Because the school aims to be a home from home, 24/7 for our 200 girls, we’ve provided campus-wide wireless access and, as a genuine BYOD environment, we allow an authenticated network connection and support their devices, whatever they may be. We also have SMARTboards and video in each classroom and a 100Mb dedicated leased line.”
Martin’s mandate from the School Governors is to drive costs down and printing costs were a large target as they had been spiralling each year with increased use. His aim was to reduce the volume of printing and move from colour to mono printing where possible: “With PaperCut we can now provide a balance to each pupil at the start of each term and accurately recharge for any top-ups. For our photography students who need costly colour printouts we can now accurately recharge all the printing, and of course, each user now has the choice of double-checking the price of what they are about to print. We now confidently know the cost per page and have been able to move our colour print volumes to the most appropriate devices and in most cases focus users on mono printing.”
“By making people feel guilty about printing in colour, we’ve been able to stop colour printing unless it’s absolutely necessary – the psychology of use has been very interesting and has created a real change in behaviour. For instance, for teachers who are photocopying lots of collated, stapled sheets, colour printing is unnecessary. By being able to confirm the cost prior to printing, our users think twice about what they’re printing and it has also helped them to overcome errors and misprints.”
“We’ve have added more printers over time to cope with the demands of our staff and students. We’ve kept some of the older KYOCERA mono printers because they are absolutely superb, unbelievably fast and very reliable. We now have 20 printers and 5 MFPs in the school, some are primarily for students, some are solely for staff use and others are mixed use. For instance, we have the larger KYOCERA devices in the C1 Computer Suite while the big colour MFP is just for staff use. We obviously can’t install drivers and PaperCut on every device within the school but our students know the process when they need to print.”
“KYOCERA printer drivers are excellent and stable. The printers themselves are good but it’s the driver quality that makes all the difference. The hardware itself is very robust and we’ve seen a drastic tailing off of incidents. We’re also seeing a move to duplex printing – I used to be anti-duplex because of our previous experiences but with KYOCERA duplex definitely seems to be the way forward for us.”
“Setting up the KYOCERA printers to scan to network has been a brilliant way to reduce our printing. The school’s sixty staff, and its students each have different permissions and anyone can go to a copier, hit send, choose an account and scan. From the beginning of this term to half term over 33% of our printing was duplex and only 9% colour which is vastly better than our previous figure of 30% colour printing. We now have our entire fleet under control and for the first time have a truly global view of our costs. This is imperative as we need to make every £ we spend really work and we’re satisfied that we now have a reliable solution which really has no negatives for the school.”