THE ROMERO CATHOLIC ACADEMY MAC

The Romero Catholic Academy MAC was established in 2015, implementing 7 existing primary schools and 1 secondary school, with over 3500 students.

Part of the Digital Strategy was to centralise and transform the trusts’ IT Infrastructure by embracing cloud technology. Romero Academy Trust decided to incorporate Windows Laptops for the secondary school, and Chromebooks in the primaries, utilising GSuite & Microsoft 365 respectively, engaging in the best use of new technologies throughout the organisation.

Prior to Senso

Prior to this centralisation, the individual primary schools had invested in an on-premise solution for online safeguarding and classroom management.

This classroom IT control client wasn’t utilised due to a reported clunky interface and complex controls for teachers and IT staff within the school, alongside a lack of accessible training. The teachers therefore quickly disengaged with the classroom management element of the original solution, reducing it’s value significantly.

The schools safeguarding staff however did use the software, but only to mark sensitive screenshots as false positive or investigative matters, often finding that the number of false positives was detrimental to proactive safeguarding due to the time-consuming number of false-positive logs which were coming through, and lack of intelligent refinement and customisation options. An example being the DSL’s were desperate to add to the detection libraries to provide more relevant and accurate monitoring, but this wasn’t possible.

Implementing Senso

A powerful cloud-based classroom management solution.

With the implementation and transition to the cloud now becoming an embedded strategy in mid-2019, the Trust felt strongly about finding a better online safeguarding and classroom management solution, at which point they discovered Senso.

A free trial proved Senso was the only truly cloud-based solution available, clearly designed for multi-site management without taking away and of the key customisations for school-based staff, alongside a proactive and intelligent monitoring and safeguarding solution.

Confidently Safeguard
Staff and Students Online

The pandemic then hit in March 2020. This of course came with a multitude of challenges for every school, but that fact that Senso Safeguarding continued to monitor when devices were being worked on away from school intrinsically, with no extra settings, technology or changes required, meant the Trust could continue confidently safeguarding their students and staff online through such a difficult period.

An influx of new devices was quickly and easily enrolled to Senso prior to being handed to students. IT Support also benefitted from remote support and management tools provided within Senso, allowing then to support student and staff working from home. On the Senso home page, technicians were able to speak in live time to a support agent all within minutes of submitting a ticket. Senso also provided a comprehensive library of guides that were easily navigated when a problem came.

Technical Support

Andy Martin from the technical support team at Senso, who has dealt with our schools in Romero, has responded immediately to emails and always been available for a Teams call to calm any concerns.

Plans are already being discussed to get Teachers full access to the platform to control student devices, safeguarding staff have great feedback about the potential use of the platform and we are now in talks with Senso at a more strategic level around how we can better use Senso to protect our students and staff online with enhanced reporting and new features.