About the Gardener Schools Group

The Gardener Schools Group is a family of four co-educational schools based in London. Comprising Ravenscourt Park Preparatory School, Kew Green Preparatory School and Nursery, Kew House School and Maida Vale School, the Group is “committed to providing independent education of the highest quality that meets each individual child’s needs”.

The Objective

Central to the Group’s commitment is the provision of the highest standards of safeguarding as defined by the recently updated Department for Education’s Keeping Children Safe in Education (KCSIE) guidelines.

The Challenge

The Group recognised that the internet usage reporting they were receiving from their firewall would not be sufficient to meet the new KCSIE guidelines. Furthermore, the reports were not user-friendly and not suitable for rolling out to their four Designated Safeguarding Leads (DSL’s).

IT Manager at Gardener Schools Group, Hitesh Bhojan:

We needed a solution that helped us meet the KCSIE guidelines without requiring significant investment in additional infrastructure. We also needed something that offered a really simple interface for our non-technical DSL’s while giving us the ability to monitor and report on all internet usage from any device, including BYOD.

The Solution

Hitesh engaged leading technology specialist EducAite to help them analyse the various options on the market and quickly identified that Fastvue provided them what they needed.

As soon as EducAite brought Fastvue to us we were confident that it provided exactly what we needed and within days we had the solution implemented, providing us with the detailed ad-hoc and scheduled reporting, alerting and monitoring on our entire estate’s internet usage we needed to not only meet, but exceed the KCSIE mandate.

The Benefits

Gardener Schools Group have realised the following benefits:

• Simple to implement, minimal training required, cost-effective

• No additional infrastructure needed

• Clarity and ease of reporting

• Speed and accuracy of keyword alerts

• Ability to support BYOD – any device, any user, anywhere

• Ability to be proactive when monitoring internet usage

Fastvue’s value has been demonstrated multiple times since we brought it on board. For example, we were quickly able to spot when a student was trying to bypass our network by logging on to a proxy server and proactively deal with it, thanks to Fastvue’s real time alerting.

Conclusion

With the recent updates to the web filtering and monitoring elements of the Keeping Children Safe in Education (KCSiE) guidelines, having robust, extensive internet usage monitoring in place is absolutely critical. While there are many options on the market, only Fastvue reports directly from firewall logs, uniquely ensuring total coverage including BYOD, lower TCO, and easy implementation, providing simple yet hyper-detailed reports and alerts that even the most non-technical person can create.