Anyone who works in a school knows exactly how precious time is. Between teaching, marking, fundraising, parents’ evenings and everything else, there rarely seems to be enough hours in the day. That is why streamlining your processes can be so important. Spending more time on tasks than is necessary can seem such an enormous waste, particularly when there are far more important things to do.
On top of time management, schools are also required to be on top of a whole range of other challenges, including budgets, safety and environmental concerns. It can seem like an uphill struggle to balance them all, but becoming a paperless school could be one way to tackle more than one issue and save time as well.
To explain further, Gavin Prior, Operations Director at Rads Storage, shares his insights on why your school should become paperless.
Time saving
Teachers, school leaders and support staff will all tell you that time is the one resource that is in shortest supply within schools. One of the biggest drains on that time is the mountain of paperwork that every member of staff is faced with on a daily basis but going digital can help everyone. Giving pupils feedback online is often quicker and can give parents more of an idea how their child is faring at school too.
Making the school office a paperless environment can also be a massive time saver when manual filing, printing and the sending home of letters is no longer needed. It also means you will never need to go hunting for a reply slip in the bottom of child’s bag ever again. This can now all be done electronically, which can make each task that little bit faster.
Even the staff room can feel the benefit of going paperless, with the ability to give Christmas party RSVPs, sign up for after-school supervision or state their intentions for INSET days all being done online. This means the space can become somewhere that staff can take a few minutes to switch off, and the area can be used to focus more on staff wellbeing.
Once the paperwork begins to build up, there will also come a point when someone has to sort through it all, deciding what still needs to be kept and what can be shredded. A job that you think will only take a few minutes then ends up costing you hours or even days.
By keeping everything on computer files, it is much easier to know where everything is. It is all easily access and sorted and can be accessed from home as well as when you are in the building. By improving organisation, you can make many more processes slicker, and there is no chance of anyone claiming that the dog ate their homework.
A click of a button is always much quicker than the manual alternative, and the minutes saved by becoming paperless can quickly start to add up.
Budget concerns
There is no budget tighter than a school budget, and every penny has to be carefully accounted for. With recent estimates showing that school printing costs can be in the region of £65,000 each year, the benefits of going paperless become obvious.
By cutting down on the paper, ink, and staples your running costs will decrease immediately, and there will be less of a need for high value spending on printers, photocopiers and laminators too. This would mean there would be substantially more cash that could be put towards teaching and learning in your school, which is sure to lead to better outcomes for everyone involved.
Sustainability
Becoming eco-conscious is no longer a buzzword, it is something we all need to embrace. Concerns about the planet are now very real, and schools can have a massive carbon footprint. Moving to becoming a paperless school plays a massive part in reducing waste and reducing the number of trees that need to be sacrificed.
Most schools now model recycling to their pupils, but this is also a chance to model sustainability and send them off into the world with a different way of thinking.
Space saving
Boxes of paper seem to pile up in every corner of a school. That’s not to mention the files packed full of children’s work that has to be kept year on year. The filing cabinets packed full of forms and important document mean that office floor space is also at a premium, and all of it just seems to keep growing.
Storing everything digitally helps to free up more space for desks, fun areas and social activities. Adding up all of the paper storage that you currently use could really surprise you.
Security
Schools carry a lot of sensitive information about pupils, staff, parents and governors, so it is vital that this is given paramount security. A lock on a filing cabinet has rarely foiled a hardened criminal, and that’s before we even consider the accidental inclusion of a document in amongst another pile of papers. With so many bits of paper floating around, it is easy for some of it to finish up in the wrong hands.
By storing your important documents digitally, you can put a whole range of security in place to ensure they are only ever accessed by the right people. This include passwords and biometric scanning to ensure everything is completely secure.
Storing your important documents and schoolwork digitally means that they can also be accessed even in the event of a disaster. Fire or flood no longer means that all is lost and is it much easier for everyone to be able to pick up where they left off.
Becoming a paperless school has such a huge range of benefits for all of the staff and stakeholders. It allows teachers to get back to doing what they do best, keeps everyone safe and makes for a better school environment. You can take this great opportunity to prepare your pupils for the future in a responsible way and make the work life of all of your staff that little bit more bearable.
Gavin Prior is the Operations Manager at Rads Document Storage, a secure facility based in Nottingham which provides professional document management services.
