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Free assessment
Find out where you stand against the DfE standards
Sixty minutes against all twelve DfE digital and technology standards, the six core ones first. You get a governor-ready summary of where you stand and a dated plan for each gap, whether or not anything else follows.
Who books this
- A governor, trustee or inspector has asked how you are doing against the standards and you do not have a defensible answer yet
- You are a trust inheriting schools with different networks, suppliers and contract end dates
- A grant condition or framework bid has raised Cyber Essentials and you need to know which level, and what would fail
- Filtering is in place and you are less confident about who reviews the monitoring alerts
What you get
- A one-page position statement against each of the twelve standards: met, partly met, or not met, with the evidence for each
- The six core standards ranked by how far you are from meeting them and what closing each gap involves
- A straight answer on Cyber Essentials versus Cyber Essentials Plus, and whether you would pass today
- A dated, sequenced plan written around the school calendar, so the disruptive work lands in the holidays
What we need from you
- Whoever holds the digital brief, and ideally the business manager or bursar, for the call
- Your current broadband, wireless and support contracts, or at least their end dates
- Read access to your Microsoft 365 admin centre, or a screen share if you would rather not grant it
- Any date that is driving this: a bid, a grant condition, an inspection window or a governor meeting
When not to book this
If you have a current baseline against all twelve standards, a roadmap your governors have seen this year, and somebody who can say who reviewed last week's monitoring alerts, you are further along than most. Spend the hour on the standard you already know is weakest instead.
Other assessments
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- Cloud cost review: Non-production running around the clock, orphaned resources nobody decommissioned, and licences still assigned to leavers. Forty-five minutes to quantify yours.
- Cyber Essentials readiness check: The five control themes, checked against what you actually run. Most first-time failures are the same handful of things, and all of them are cheaper to fix before you apply.
- Application compatibility assessment: Migrations do not stall on operating systems, they stall on a handful of applications nobody can account for. This sorts your estate into the four groups that actually matter, before you commit budget to any of it.
- Virtual desktop review: Whether you are choosing between Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365 or already running one and paying more than you expected, this is the same review: what the estate is doing, what it costs, and what it should cost.
- Copilot readiness check: Copilot does not grant anyone a single permission they did not already have. It just makes what they already had very easy to find, which is why the permissions work belongs before the licences and not after.
- Backup and recovery review: Everyone has a backup. Far fewer have a restore. The question worth answering is not whether jobs are running, it is when somebody last proved one and how long the business would be down.
- Application and reporting discovery: Most bespoke software goes wrong at scoping rather than in the build, and the most valuable thing a first conversation can do is establish whether you should be commissioning software at all.
- Endpoint and Intune review: Not whether Intune says the estate is compliant, but whether that means what you think it means: what is enrolled, what has gone quiet, which policies are actually winning, and what you could prove if somebody asked.