Keeping a laser eye on key school assets

Schools increasingly need to have at their disposal a wide range of equipment in order to deliver lessons successfully. These can range from IT items such as laptops and PCs to devices such as projectors, as well as traditional items like textbooks. The type of equipment used can vary from school to school – a school catering to pupils with special needs may use specialist furniture, while a designated technology college will require greater numbers of computers.
    
With the growth in the size and complexity of schools’ asset portfolios, the need for a clear and comprehensive asset tracking strategy is becoming apparent. In the past, schools have relied on traditional auditing measures like spreadsheets, but these are increasingly proving inadequate and overly time consuming. School managers throughout the UK have declared their need for efficient digital tracking systems that maintain a complete inventory of supplies that staff can access conveniently. We take a look at some schools that have benefited from implementing modern asset monitoring systems.

TIMESAVING
The Arnewood School in Hampshire is a mixed comprehensive with over 1,300 students. The school, a second phase designated technology college, has invested heavily in equipment and infrastructure, with some 300 PCs, six dedicated ICT rooms and widespread WiFi access. The school had issues with information overload and struggled to manage its ICT assets efficiently.
    
Deputy head teacher Nigel Pressnell comments on the difficulties the school had: “Under our ‘Laptop for Learning’ scheme, all 120 members and some 200 students have their own laptop. Our ICT technician was not looking his best. Knee-deep in paperwork, three weeks after beginning his auditing marathon from one side of the school to the other, he still hadn’t finished. We were all agreed – there must be a better way of doing this.
    
“For the annual audit, we needed to know exactly what equipment we had and, just as importantly, where it was all located,” Nigel explains. “Laptops, cameras and wireless devices were regularly moved from classroom to classroom or taken off-site by teachers or students working from home.”
    
Another difficulty was ensuring that all software was fully compliant with licensing laws. Nigel says: “Our school runs more than 80 licensed software titles, many of which need renewing at different times. We are legally obliged to keep track of this information to avoid falling foul of licensing laws. It became clear that, in order to avoid staff wasting hours on time-consuming administration and to ensure proper planning, we needed to find a software package to do the hard work for us.”
    
Arnewood chose a system by Parago which works with its existing ICT infrastructure. Nigel explains: “[The system] automatically scans each PC every 24 hours to collect all hardware and software assets into one central source.” It picks up on irregular activity on the school’s computers, so when a student tries to install non-educational material staff are notified immediately.
    
The school’s system requirements went beyond day-to-day asset management – it also needed to serve as an insurance policy against disaster, as Nigel explains: “Logging important data in paper log books would be useless in the event of a fire, so it was essential that the asset management solution we chose was hosted off-site.”

DIVERSE APPLICATIONS
South Craven School, a large secondary in North Yorkshire, initially sought to implement an asset tracking system for basic resource management before linking it with portable appliance testing. However, as premises manager Kika Bowen explains, “we have begun to utilise the system in a more sophisticated, but simple way, using the databases to manage a number of different processes.”
    
The new system, supplied by UK company Asset Trac, has delivered numerous benefits, such as providing assurance to the Head and Governing Body that school assets are maintained properly and giving facilities managers the scope to “efficiently oversee day-to-day operational management of the premises.” The asset tagging system adopted by South craven covers areas like the fire and emergency lighting system, water checks and security.
    
Kika says of the advantages when it comes to furniture management: “Having the ability to effectively stock take can reduce occurrences of double purchasing. Also multiple scanners can enable several members of staff to participate in stock taking without repeating the same work tasks.”

ONLINE
When Marist Catholic Primary School in West Byfleet, Surrey, moved into its purpose built premises in 2007, the school’s management team decided to track its resources through an asset management system. Facilities manager Jenny Duckham says: “Everything from hardware, software licenses and leased equipment to resource planning, insurance and preparing for audits requires us to keep an up to date inventory. It was decided that a system designed for the education market would offer the most comprehensive and cost effective method of managing our resources.”
    
The new system, supplied by Parago, allows the school to monitor all of its resources using mobile apps, giving staff greater flexibility in their decision making: “The fact you can go online and see everything, manage all assets and even lock the system down as much as you want to is a great advantage,” Jenny says. “If our governors want to know how much it would cost to refurbish a classroom, we have all the information at our fingertips. Whereas previously we would have to wade through paperwork to find out where we got things from and how much they cost us, now the information is a couple of clicks away.”

UNIQUE NEEDS
Wennington Hall is a maintained residential and day special school based in Lancashire. The school caters for the needs of around 100 boys of secondary school age who experience difficulties associated with their academic, social, emotional and/or behavioural development.
    
Bookings coordinator Charlotte Lowis says: “We are a unique school and the needs of our pupils mean that we offer a lot of specialist equipment. Any school – specialist or not– needs to be able to track its assets and we were initially using the Lancashire County Council register. This was an onerous task as the system was not set up to identify which assets need to be tracked and which do not. As a result we often had to spend time removing smaller items such as stationery. Ultimately this becomes a false efficiency and the need for a comprehensive asset management system became clear.”
    
As with other schools where a fully equipped tracking system has been installed, Wennington Hall soon began to see a reduction in workload which gave allowed staff to devote more time to important tasks. “We’ve had some real ‘thank goodness’ moments since the system has been implemented,” Charlotte says. “Having a solution that lets you record information, produce full inventories and audits at the click of a mouse is most certainly a time-saver.”

CONCLUSION
An asset management solution can, if tailored properly to a school’s needs, give advantages beyond time saving and safety. Nigel Pressnell of Arnewood praises the “clear potential it offers schools to strategically plan their ICT development”, arguing that its system is “not only effective as an asset management tool, but also as an expert system guiding school leaders towards sensible purchasing decisions.”
    
The examples highlighted here show that updating a school’s resource tracking system can deliver holistic benefits that facilitate the efficient management of a 21st century school. And ultimately, as Nigel points out, “it takes the burden of auditing away from staff and allows them to do what they do best – teach.”