Bloxx Helps St George’s College Deliver a Safe & Secure Learning Environment

“Now anyone in the IT team can manage web filtering with just a few minutes training – it’s that intuitive.”

Darren Harryman, IT and Network Manager, St. George’s College

Background

Based on two sites in Weybridge in Surrey, St. George’s College is a leading independent Roman Catholic co-educational school. With over 800 students, the Junior School provides education for the three to 11 year age range, the college for 12 to 15 and the Sixth Form College for 16 to 18. The school prides itself on inspiring a love of learning and to encourage all to fulfil their aspirations and potential within an atmosphere of mutual respect and compassion. The school makes substantial investment in ICT and on-line learning resources play an increasingly important role with in the school.

The Challenge

The college had been using RM Smart Cache to manage Internet access for staff and students. However, the IT department felt that the solution was awkward and time consuming to configure and was prone to crashing.

“Most of the configuration had to be done from the command line and this made it less than intuitive to manage;” said Darren Harryman, IT and Network Manager at St. George’s. “The time we had to devote to constantly adding URLs to the system, the number of support calls received due to system crashes and the regular loss of Internet access, meant that my IT staff were spending excessive amounts of time dealing with this.”

“In addition, the system did not give us any capability to provide different levels of access based on the academic year, for example.”

Harryman was concerned that these problems were allowing students to easily circumvent the web filtering by accessing anonymous proxy sites and might potentially end up viewing or downloading inappropriate content.

“Child protection is our first priority and so blocking access to inappropriate content is critical. Our second priority is to ensure that we are not compromising our network with viruses, spyware and other types of malware.”

The Solution

After extensively evaluating a number of different web filtering solutions, Harryman and his team determined that the Bloxx web filtering appliance was the most appropriate solution for the college. The Bloxx web filter uses Tru-View Technology to analyse and catagorise web pages at the point of request, and so virtually eliminates the need to manually block or allow web sites.

The Results

“The Bloxx appliance integrated easily into our network and configuring a range of different access policies was straightforward due to the fact that Bloxx works directly with Active Directory. In practise that means we can now have different access policies for staff and students and that we can have a stricter access policy for year one that becomes more relaxed as students progress through the year groups. Before Bloxx it was all or nothing which resulted in a lot of support calls to the IT Team.”

The college also makes extensive use of the automatic reporting capability of the Bloxx Appliance.

“One of the IT team has a quick check of the daily log reports just to spot any anomalies, but our confidence is so high that Bloxx is doing its job that it literally now just takes a few minutes. Every month the whole team looks at a report showing blocked sites and we then use a very light-handed approach to remind persistent offenders about our acceptable use policy. That approach seems to be very effective.”

The college also uses the reports to ensure that investment in on-line resources is justified.

“The college invests heavily in on-line teaching and learning resources, which is a huge benefit to students and staff. Now when subscriptions are up for renewal we can run a quick report that shows how often the resource is being used and if the investment is worthwhile. That helps us ensure the IT budget is being used more effectively.”

Harryman is extremely pleased with the significant difference that Bloxx has made to the IT department’s workload.

“Before Bloxx we were getting over 20 support calls every week to allow or block sites, and we had to spend a lot of time managing web filtering. With Bloxx we have reduced the number of support calls by over 75% and in fact it’s now over a month since we had any support calls about web filtering. That’s made out job significantly easier and allowed us to get on and deliver more urgent projects.”

“The Bloxx appliance is significantly more reliable and much simpler to manage than our previous web filter. Now anyone in the IT team can manage web filtering with just a few minutes training – it’s that intuitive.”

Tru-View Technology has also proved just how effective it is at blocking inappropriate content.

“The fact that Tru-View can automatically categorise web pages which on the surface appear to be appropriate but in reality are not, is a huge benefit. For example we now have no issues with anonymous proxies. This has given us a very high level of confidence that we are providing a safe, secure and productive learning environment for our students.”