The school holiday IT checklist: what has to happen before day one of term

Every school knows the feeling: it's 8:40am on the first day of term, a class set of laptops won't sign in, the interactive panel in Room 12 is showing "no input", and the help desk queue is forming outside the office. Almost none of it was bad luck — it was work that needed to happen in the holidays and didn't.

After years of running school fleets, we plan every term break against the same checklist. Here it is — use it with your current provider, your internal coordinator, or us.

Weeks 1–2 of the break: the heavy lifting

• Update everything while nobody's watching. Windows feature updates, iPadOS, firmware on switches, wireless controllers and interactive panels — the disruptive updates that can't run during term. Stagger them so one bad update doesn't brick the whole fleet at once.
• Re-image or re-enrol problem devices. Every fleet accumulates a tail of devices that limp through term. The holidays are when the tail gets fixed or retired.
• Process leavers and starters. Disable departed staff and student accounts (a real security gap, not just tidiness), provision new starters, rebuild class groups so shared drives, printing and filtering policies land correctly on day one.
• Test the restore, not the backup. Pick a system, restore it, time it. A term boundary is also when retention policies and archives should be reviewed.

Final week: prove it works

• Walk the rooms. Power on every interactive panel, projector and charging trolley. Test one device from each class set end to end: sign-in, Wi-Fi, filtered browsing, printing, the LMS.
• Load-test the Wi-Fi where it matters. The library and the biggest teaching spaces see day-one crowds. Confirm coverage and capacity before 300 devices associate at 8:50am.
• Verify filtering and safeguarding policies on a student account — not an admin one. Policies have a habit of drifting during holiday changes.
• Check the timetable-critical apps. Whatever your school runs on — attendance, timetabling, the LMS — sign in as a teacher and complete one real task.

Day one: staffed, visible, fast

However good the preparation, day one generates tickets. The difference between a rough morning and a smooth one is response design: a visible tech presence near the staff room before school, a priority window for teacher issues in periods one and two, and a same-day rule for anything blocking a class. Teachers forgive a glitch; they remember being left stranded in front of thirty students.

And the meta-point

If your provider treats school holidays as quiet time rather than delivery time, you have a generalist provider. School IT runs on an inverted calendar — the "breaks" are the busiest engineering windows of the year, and the term plan should be agreed a term ahead. That's how we structure every school support agreement we run.