Case study: South Australia Department for Education revamps networks for schools

The South Australian Department for Education needed a secure network infrastructure to provide internet access for all of its schools.

Dan Hughes, chief information officer at the South Australian Department for Education spoke with Digital Nation about their journey to implement a safer and faster network for its students.

He said the problem was they needed to quickly come up with a solution to get internet into the 870 schools across South Australia.

“We needed to also consider our preschools through the process as well, which there was at that time about 380 preschools in our system that were suffering the same issues,” he said.

“Even schools that were five minutes from the CBD, given unfortunately the NBN activity in this state probably wasn't to the level it should have been. Many of our schools were doing it tough and the issues were obvious in that students didn't have access to what they needed online.”

To rectify this, the Department for Education implemented Palo Alto Networks’ solution to having visibility into almost the entire public school network across South Australia.

This means that any incidents of cyberbullying or students accessing inappropriate content can be dealt with proactively and in a timely manner by teachers and other school staff.

Hughes said there have been savings and efficiencies for schools as they don’t need to do network monitoring.

“As part of that consortium, we've got the tools that we centrally monitor that, which we never had before. Where there are schools that have their own IT staff, the tools have been smart enough that we've been able to provide those texts at those sites with that same capability, which they never had before,” he said.

“The fact that every school now has a consistent platform to monitor student behaviour. That's been powerful when we consider student wellbeing now into this year, and, and the cyber implications associated with that, which has been awesome.”

From this new network, Hughes said the Department for Education bought a bandwidth bank, a new concept in Australia.

Hughes explained that it gave the department a chunk of bandwidth where they were able to understand teacher and student usage.

“That was really powerful for us, the fact that we could then put that in front of principals and preschools in a way that was meaningful to them so they could understand what this investment looked like,” he said.

“The fact that we could save significant money for our schools and preschools who were having to traditionally pay for these platforms and invest themselves.”

He added, “The department now offsets the cost of internet capability for each school. Prior to 2018, they were just doing it themselves, we centralise that and manage it on their behalf.”

Hughes explained for the first time, the department has tools like alerting set consistently across the system, which he says has been astronomical for them.  

“It means we've at least got a significant level of confidence for the first time that we're set up to manage appropriately now but we've future-proofed our platforms now to the extent that we've got confidence going forward,” he ended.