Online assessments: is your network ready for the one week it really matters?

NAPLAN and a growing share of formal assessment now happen online, through locked-down browsers, on your school's network, inside a fixed testing window. On results day nobody remembers the Wi-Fi — but during the window, nothing else about your ICT matters more. A dropped access point during a writing test isn't an IT ticket; it's thirty interrupted assessments and a very difficult conversation with parents.

Here's how we prepare school networks and fleets for online assessment — a checklist worth running at least a term before your window.

1. Capacity is about density, not speed

The brochure speed of your internet link matters less than what happens when 120 devices in three adjacent rooms associate with the same access points simultaneously. Assessment traffic itself is modest; the killer is concurrency. A proper readiness check maps AP placement against your actual testing rooms, confirms channel planning, and load-tests with a realistic device count — not one technician's laptop on a quiet afternoon.

2. The locked-down browser has to be deployed, not hoped for

Online assessments run inside a locked-down browser that disables everything else on the device. It must be installed, updated to the current version and launch-tested on every device that will be used — including the loan pool. With a managed fleet this is one Intune deployment and a compliance report; done by hand, it's the job that quietly doesn't get finished. Device requirements change between cycles, so pin this task to each assessment year, not to "we did it once".

3. Whitelist before you rely on filtering

School web filtering and firewalls are designed to interfere with unknown traffic — which is exactly what an assessment platform looks like the first time. The platform's required domains need to be explicitly allowed through your filter, firewall and any SSL inspection, then verified from a student account in an actual testing room. Every year, somewhere, a test fails because the fix was applied to the staff network only.

4. Plan for the failure you hope not to have

• Power: charged devices plus charged spares in the room, not down the corridor.
• Devices: a loan pool of at least 10% of the largest sitting, imaged and tested.
• Network: know your failover story — a second link, a 4G/5G backup, or at minimum an agreed procedure with the assessment coordinator for pausing and resuming.
• People: a technician physically on site for the window, empowered to fix rather than escalate. Remote support is fine for term time; it is not fine mid-assessment.

5. Rehearse with the practice window

Assessment platforms provide practice and readiness tests for a reason. Run them at full class scale in the real rooms, on the real devices, through the real filter. Every issue found in rehearsal is one that doesn't happen with a nervous Year 5 cohort watching the clock.