The building has been empty for six weeks and now it is full again. Things will have broken over the summer that nobody has noticed yet.
The proper version of this job needs an empty building and about an hour, and that window has gone. So this is the version for a school that is already open, already teaching, and has no spare hour anywhere in the week.
Five things. None of them take long.
1. Ask staff what is not working
You have got a couple of hundred people using the system for the first time since July. They will find problems faster than you will.
Send one message on the first morning and ask them to report anything that is not working, today, rather than living with it. Most staff will put up with a broken thing for a fortnight before they mention it, especially in the first week when everyone is busy and it feels like a small thing to complain about. Say out loud that you want to hear about it now.
Then actually log the ones that come in, or you will get the same message from four people and deal with none of them.
2. Walk the wifi at lunchtime
Test it when the building is busy. Hall, library, the mobile classroom, the far end of the KS2 corridor. Stand where a teacher stands with a trolley of thirty iPads and load something that needs a bit of bandwidth.
Testing at eight in the morning with nobody else in does not tell you much. The network copes fine with one person on it.
If the hall is bad, it is usually because there is one access point trying to cover a room built to hold the whole school. That is a summer job now, not a September one, but you want it on the list while you have proof.
3. Close the July leavers
Anyone who left in July should be disabled by now. Disable rather than delete — deleting starts a countdown on their files and mailbox, and you usually want those for a while yet.
Then go through everything that is not Microsoft 365:
- The MIS
- The safeguarding system
- Parent communications and the payments system
- Group chats and any staff WhatsApp
- Reading scheme and subject platforms, especially the ones on a shared login nobody owns
That list is the bit that gets missed, because it sits outside whoever set up the accounts. It is also the bit an auditor asks about.
If a leaver held an admin account or knew a shared password, change it this week. Not at half term.
4. Book the disruptive jobs for after school
Anything that takes a system down now must happen after half past three or at a weekend. Server work, switch replacements, the big updates you did not get finished in August.
Write that list this week while you can still remember what needs doing. By October you will be dealing with whatever the week throws at you, and the list will not get written.
5. Restore a file
Pick a file from last term. Restore it somewhere new. Open it.
Most schools have never done this. The dashboard says the backup ran, everyone takes that to mean the files come back, and nobody finds out otherwise until they need one. Restoring is the only way to know.
If you cannot work out how to do it, that is worth knowing in September rather than in February. [CASE STUDY: a real example here would be much stronger than the general point — a school that tried a restore and found something wrong with it.]
What to do with what you find
Five checks will usually turn up two or three things. Fix anything under ten minutes on the spot. For the rest, put a name and a date against each one. A list without names on it does not get done.
One more, while you are thinking about it: write the IT support number and your account details on a piece of paper and stick it somewhere visible in the office. When the systems are down you cannot look it up.