VIEWS & OPINION
How we’re keeping Nottingham College secure Comment by YASIR RAFI, Head of IT Services at Nottingham College
The education sector is increasingly a target for cyberattacks. Recent research shows that 73% of the United Kingdom’s education sector has faced cyberattacks in the past five years, compared to 50% of all UK businesses.
A key reason is that academic institutions manage huge, dispersed sites with thousands of personal and official devices, including a mixture of on-premises and cloud systems.
This is complicated by a colossal user turnover, during which thousands of students and staff have status changes that require robust identity management to avoid their exposure to cyberattacks. In my role at Nottingham College, I’m responsible for ensuring the digital safety of our 25,000 students and 1,700 staff. Leveraging ManageEngine solutions has enabled me and my team to significantly improve IT infrastructure and assure maximum security. The IT complexities of managing a large site like Nottingham College are huge and exhausting. With services becoming more distributed, and IT becoming central to our operations, the demands on the IT service desk have grown exponentially. We manage and secure an array of devices, networks, applications, and storage systems, each critical to someone and needed around the clock.
Simultaneously, it’s essential to make wise, long-term investments that not only meet our immediate needs but also reinforce the senior leadership team’s confidence in our strategic direction and capabilities. Despite the unique cybersecurity challenges faced by institutions like ours, only around half have a formal security strategy in place, making them vulnerable to digital attacks. The specific circumstances in educational institutions heighten the risk of impersonation, malware, and denial-of-service attacks. Maintaining password hygiene is challenging with a constantly changing user base, and the variability of devices and
apps increases the likelihood of malware infiltrating our systems. If our services don’t scale quickly enough, they may fail during peak times, such as enrolment. Furthermore, many organisations in our sector struggle with good user education, which is needed to train students and staff alike to spot potential cyberattacks.
We onboarded a bunch of ManageEngine’s comprehensive solutions, namely ServiceDesk Plus, ADManager Plus, ADAudit Plus, and Patch Manager Plus. These solutions have become a big part of what we do daily, helping us navigate the challenges of onboarding new users, securing digital identities, managing about 11,000 assets, and automating processes. They have also enabled us to mitigate both the drain on IT staff time and potential security risks.
ManageEngine products are crucial for ensuring compliance with the UK’s Cyber Essentials program—from our devices to our servers and anything else that’s connected to our network. At Nottingham College, we need to stay secure day in and day out, away from hackers, and away from any danger. With ManageEngine’s constant support and tailor-made solutions, we have expanded our knowledge of being cyber-aware. The results speak for themselves. ManageEngine tools have helped improve our internal user satisfaction from 51% to 85%. With the support of ServiceDesk Plus, about 80% of our issues and requests are resolved within 24 hours.
In our future forecast, we are looking to explore the introduction of Zia—a native AI engine and conversational virtual agent—which will be integrated with ServiceDesk Plus to answer common questions. This is expected to improve user experiences and help streamline tasks, especially during busy times like the first week of teaching.
Our work with ManageEngine has shown us how, with the right tools and partners in place, education institutions can meet the challenges surrounding cybersecurity. It’s tough out there—but there is a way forward.
How apprenticeships can help all children to be ready for school Comment by MARK BOTHA, CEO of Shaping Lives
There is increasing recognition of the importance of quality early years provision, evidenced by the government’s school readiness milestone target, to increase the proportion of four- and five-year-olds ready for school from 60% to 75% in coming years.
While this focus aims to equip future generations with tools for educational and personal success, more support is needed, especially for children with special educational needs.
The UK’s early years sector has undergone significant changes following the expansion of free childcare under the previous government, which is set to be further extended this September.
This pressure is underpinned by Labour’s pledge to open an additional 3,000 nursery places, as well as changes to government-funded childcare hours. The new measures will offer up to 30 funded hours of childcare per week, over 38 weeks of the year, to children aged nine months and over, with the policy set to be delivered by September 2025. According to the Department for Education’s projections, around 70,000 new places and 35,000 additional early years educators will be needed to meet the demand placed on the childcare sector. The sector is also responding to the urgent challenge around SEND provision in early years. Recent reports highlighted that a shortage of special needs support in the sector, combined with more children being diagnosed with special educational needs, is increasing pressure on childcare providers and schools.
The Autumn Budget announced an additional £1bn in funding for 28
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schools to support SEND provision, in light of the growing number of youngsters with an education, health, and care plan (EHCP), which is at the highest rate in six years. However, no additional support was confirmed for the early years sector, which is integral in identifying children with complex needs, to support them in entering mainstream education.
The drive to get more children ready to start school begins in the early years setting. Research consistently shows that children who receive robust support at this stage are likely to achieve more academically and develop better social-emotional skills, which has a long-lasting and positive impact on their lives.
If the sector is going to meet these requirements, we need a highly trained and motivated workforce that’s equipped to support children with more complex needs. This is where apprenticeships can help, as they offer practical, on-the-job skills training. Open to anyone aged 16 or over, apprenticeships allow employees at all levels to upskill and learn while they work and can deliver significant benefits to nursery providers too. To meet school readiness targets and address booming childcare demand, the sector must act swiftly to recruit new employees and upskill the existing workforce to support all children.
Training is integral to achieving these aims, which is why Shaping Lives includes a specialist SENDCO module in all Level 3 apprenticeships for Early Years practitioners.
Early years apprenticeships can address the UK’s skills shortage while creating pathways to long-term careers. Training providers collaborate with nursery managers to ensure teaching applies directly to employees’ daily roles, maximising engagement and results. By working together, we can help early years providers deliver appropriate support to all children, ensuring their bright future.
March 2025
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