IT services for schools and academies

Capita update

19 May 2020

DfE has announced schools will benefit from a ground-breaking partnership to gain access to education platforms. (PDF, 68KB)

DfE laptop scheme

5 May 2020

You will have heard that the DfE scheme is now live and that Directors of Children's Services and CEOs of Academies are being written to by the DfE with indicative allocations of laptops and devices. The communication from the DfE does not mention dongles (4G for use where no internet connection is available) but it is our understanding that these are also included in the offer.

Suffolk County Council has been given its indicative allocation for both children with social workers and for Year 10 pupils in LA maintained schools who are in need of this resource. Like many of you, we are not certain of timescales but have been given an indicative delivery time frame of late May/ Early June, which gives some time to work out the logistics involved in safely distributing these items to our children who need them most.

Task group

We will be forming a task group next week to ensure that the delivery is joined up and we will be inviting colleagues from across the sector to ensure that there is as much co-ordination around this as possible. We want to share learning around how safeguarding is ensured; how individual children are prioritised and share the agreements and contracts that are being used between school and family in relation to their use. If you or a member of your team would like to be a part of this task group, please contact Matthew Cooke (matthew.cooke@suffolk.gov.uk) for further information.

DfE update in relation to COVID-19

21 April 2020

Dear colleague

It is vital, at this time, that all education and care settings including local authorities are able to focus on the impact of COVID-19, providing for the young people in their care and looking after the wellbeing of their staff. To help reduce burdens, the Department have reviewed all data collection activity planned for the remainder of the current academic year to ensure that any requests for data and/or information remain essential, justified and feasible.

With regards to the 2020 summer school census, the Department have concluded that this data collection will be cancelled and will not take place this year. Please note that this decision has been taken for the upcoming 2020 summer census only and the Department remains committed to the summer census taking place in future years.

We will be in touch with further details on future iterations of the school census in due course.

Regards Data Collections Service Desk.