The paperless school, is this achievable?
For many years, schools in particular use 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 can only end 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 to formulate a plan to implement the digital resources to start the transition.
In order to start to identify these processes everything needs to be broken down into smaller categories and make a list of all the current paper files that are being produced. When staff make a start on 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 & folders was in digital form from an email or downloaded from a portal etc. 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 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 viewed. The policy expires and is then shredded, printed off again and replaced. When the reality of how inefficient this is starts to take effect, the paperless world starts to gain momentum as everyone transforms the way they work.
You may ask, where can we store all of this information in digital format?
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 once the retention periods expire. It’s therefore a more cost effective system to shred documents after they have been scanned. This saves lots of time and storage space as well as making it easier for requests for data access to be more easily dealt with.
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, but is excellent for more general filing for low level data such as policies etc. Google Drive & Microsoft OneDrive also offer great options again for low level data storage.
There are so many positive benefits for cutting down on paper, even more 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
IT Director
