The school that went dark
It happened — January & June 2026BBC News, Jan 2026
In January a Warwickshire school closed when one attack took phones, email, Google Classroom and the management system down together. In June a Buckinghamshire school shut for days — during GCSE and A-level exams. Education sits near the top of this year's ransomware reports.
Your version is an independent London school with a part-time technician and a device fleet that grew a trolley at a time: staff laptops, classroom sets, iPads that charge in a cupboard. The MIS is in the cloud but the phones aren't, and staff share logins for cover lessons. Nobody has asked the question that decides whether a bad morning becomes a closed school: can a parent reach you, and do you know who's in the building? And fee-paying parents are customers — a week of visible chaos is a retention problem, not just an IT one.
This is you if Phones, email and the MIS would all fail together; there's no asset register that would survive an audit; changes happen in term time, because there's no schedule.
How we run it
If the worst happens, communication comes back first.
A school without phones is closed even if every computer works. So parent contact and safeguarding channels are restored before any server is touched — even if that starts as a text message to every family.
Triage runs by the school day, not by the systems list.
Registers and safeguarding records first, then the teaching platform, then everything else. Finance can wait a week; knowing who is in the building cannot. Reporting follows the DfE and NCSC playbook, so the head hears “handled”, not jargon.
In calm weather, the fleet is the job.
An asset register that survives an audit, device management across staff and classroom machines, and a repair pipeline through the Fixfactor workshop — cracked screens and dead batteries handled as a process with a turnaround, not a panic with a courier.
And the calendar rules everything.
Changes happen in half-terms, patching is scheduled around teaching, and exam season is frozen solid: monitoring only. June proved what the alternative looks like.
Made boring by: a per-staff-user plan priced to school budget cycles, with the “school day without IT” one-pager agreed with the head before it's ever needed. Per staff user · termly invoicing
Real events: BBC / Computing, 2026. The school described is illustrative.