The paperless school, is this achievable?

Nigel Milligan believes that once schools start switching away from time-consuming and costly paper storage systems they won’t want to stop!

For many years schools, in particular, have used reams and reams of paper and have had large, ongoing, reprographics costs. It is important to print certain types of material such as pupil resources, materials for wall displays etc; however, the majority of printing is completely unnecessary and we can only end this practice if everyone embraces a different way of thinking and makes use of digital tools – many of which are already available at no extra cost to the school.

It is understandable that school staff struggle to change the way they’ve always done things. The best way to make the changes required to work towards being as paperless as possible is to start by identifying as many of the unnecessary processes as possible in order to formulate a plan for the implementation of the digital resources as the start of  the transition. 

Identifying these processes means breaking everything down down into smaller categories and making a list of all the current paper files that are being produced. When staff make a start on this process of going through the paperwork, it’s always very liberating for them to quickly realise how much of this doesn’t need to be printed out at all! 

It’s a fact that the origin of nearly all printed material that exists in files and folders began its life in digital form via an email, downloaded from a portal, or similar. The very small amount of paper documents that arrive in the post could have simply been scanned into digital format to be stored along with the rest. One classic example of this is school policies. They are updated, printed off and filed in the relevant lever arch file. They sit there for the life of the policy and may be occasionally looked at. Eventually, the policy expires and is shredded, while its successor policy is printed off again and replaced. When the reality of how inefficient this is starts to be understood, the paperless world gain momentum as everyone begins to transform the way they work.

You may ask, ‘Where can we store all of this information in digital format?’

Well, there’s a wide variety of options available for digital document management. For schools to be 100% paperless, any confidential information must be stored in ICO-compliant systems which allows for the original paperwork to be destroyed in the same way it is now once the retention periods expire. The more cost-effective system is to shred documents as soon as they have been scanned; this approach saves lots of time and storage space, as well as making it easier for requests for data access to be more easily dealt with electronically.

An excellent solution for secure document management is Filestream Systems. This is ICO-compliant as well as being designed for use in schools. Evernote is a fantastic solution, but doesn’t comply with ISO for confidential documents; however, it is excellent for the more general filing of low level data such as policies etc. Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive also offer great options again for low level data storage.

There are so many positive benefits to cutting down on paper – even more so at this time as paper costs rapidly rise. Take a leap of faith, start small and experience a whole new way of working. 

If in doubt, please give me a shout!

Nigel Milligan is IT manager to schools and businesses, providing proactive IT support and solution