That is quite an offensive and uninformed comment.
I worked in that sector a long time ago and your hipshot is very far from my lived experience. If you want to educate yourself in what the large community of typically very dedicated IT workers in UK schools do to protect children from online harm, search for edugeek and take a look through their "filtering" related forum.
Back when I did that kind of work the web filtering tools were stil mostly commercial, e.g. Websense, and we maintained reasonably good control, but it was a cat and mouse effort. As just one example, for blocking games it wasn't enough just to block all game websites (new ones every day) and all "proxy" sites as they were known (new ones every hour), you'd also have to block things the kids brought in. At one point we wrote a script that scanned files to find all Excel documents with Flash games embedded within them via an activex component and nuke them.
This is all against the backdrop of maintaining an incredibly diverse IT setup where commercial software often had utterly appalling requirements but was mandated from on high. I now work in an organisation with >£1bn turnover and it probably has fewer licensed software packages than just one secondary school I used to work for.
What you realise over time is that the technical tools are not really the solution. Classroom teachers need to use their skills to keep children on task. Schools need to use their existing disciplinary protocols when children don't follow the agreed rules. IT staff need to provide a baseline level of safety to ensure that no child can accidentally or casually break the IT rules.
You know how you get it right? Either on prem, offline everything, or explicit allow lists controlled by teachers for that specific period. Disable USB ports.
That’s what we moved to for one of our kids who couldn’t handle it. Except we have to control the access because the school won’t. It works.
Is it perfect? No. Google Docs is the worst due to embedding. But it beats whack-a-mole.
I’ve now had to do the management job of six teachers because they apparently don’t have the skill to deal with 30 kids with Swiss cheese restrictions. This, despite significant investments in software.
I guarantee you that this is not an uninformed comment. Exactly the opposite.
All I'll tell you is:
a) you're failing at stopping malicious internal actors you're simply fixing tick boxes
b) most school networks are a complete nightmare or worse laughable with next to no separation of resources (marking a drive as hidden on windows isn't secure)
c) maintaining an adult block isn't something to be proud of, there's services that do that for free at the perimeter they're called firewalls, deploy and forget, if that's not the case you are doing it wrong.
d) oh fudjing wow you wrote a script. This makes you a l33t sysadmin among your peers... Try taking to someone who deploys Linux at scale, this is Tuesday morning to them.
Stop blaming the teachers, and while we're at it, train them to not get fished by the smart kids...
I worked in that sector a long time ago and your hipshot is very far from my lived experience. If you want to educate yourself in what the large community of typically very dedicated IT workers in UK schools do to protect children from online harm, search for edugeek and take a look through their "filtering" related forum.
Back when I did that kind of work the web filtering tools were stil mostly commercial, e.g. Websense, and we maintained reasonably good control, but it was a cat and mouse effort. As just one example, for blocking games it wasn't enough just to block all game websites (new ones every day) and all "proxy" sites as they were known (new ones every hour), you'd also have to block things the kids brought in. At one point we wrote a script that scanned files to find all Excel documents with Flash games embedded within them via an activex component and nuke them.
This is all against the backdrop of maintaining an incredibly diverse IT setup where commercial software often had utterly appalling requirements but was mandated from on high. I now work in an organisation with >£1bn turnover and it probably has fewer licensed software packages than just one secondary school I used to work for.
What you realise over time is that the technical tools are not really the solution. Classroom teachers need to use their skills to keep children on task. Schools need to use their existing disciplinary protocols when children don't follow the agreed rules. IT staff need to provide a baseline level of safety to ensure that no child can accidentally or casually break the IT rules.