Broadband for Schools
We provide fully managed, secure school broadband packages for Schools and MATs who want one provider and complete peace of mind. As an official partner of the Faster Britain network, we deliver the best possible connection speeds at the very best price.
One provider for the line, the filtering, the firewall and the support desk behind it — with a public status page and clear response targets, so you always know where you stand.
Specialist education connectivity and IT support, delivered UK-wide since 2000.
SPECIALIST SCHOOLS BROADBAND
Get more than just a solid connection
AIT provide fully managed secure school broadband packages for schools and Multi-Academy-Trusts across the UK. As we rely on technology more within education from cloud-based applications to teaching software, you need connectivity that’s fit for cloud-based learning. Our packages are designed specifically around your requirements, to maximise speed, safety and reliability; all at a price that suits your budget. We’ll provide you with the best value connections available, terminology that’s jargon free, and a solution that can scale or flex as required.
Safeguarding Portal
Filtering and monitoring built into the connection, with reporting your DSL can actually use. See Safeguarding and Filtering.
Quick Installation
Surveys, orders and go-live dates managed for you end to end — including holiday-period installs that don’t disrupt teaching.
Seamless DfE Compliance
Connections specified against DfE digital standards from day one, evidenced without extra paperwork. See DfE Connect the Classroom.
Affordable, Reliable
Direct carrier pricing with resilient options at every budget, so reliability isn’t a premium extra.
What’s in a managed school connection
Secure Internet Connections
Meet DfE standards for less whilst future proofing your connection to handle the ever-increasing demands of modern education. Thanks to our premium partnerships with carriers, AIT can offer direct pricing that’s a complete solution underpinned by our comprehensive support teams. From Dedicated Leased Lines to SuperFast Fibre FTTC and FTTP Ultrafast Fibre, AIT will work with you to find a connection that complies with DfE specifications as well as meeting the needs of your site delivering speeds from 100Mpbs to 10Gpbs with failover lines so you’re always connected.
Need a dedicated leased line, diverse failover or IPv6 detail? See our internet and leased lines for schools page.
A Network Right for you
If you’re part of a MAT, and looking for a solution that can scale and flex as you adapt and grow, our high-speed Wide Area Networks will give you the visibility of all network activity, firewall and web filtering policies in one place. Thanks to our leading cutting-edge infrastructure, your MAT will benefit from carrier grade technologies that will ensure your system is secure and robust. Our security combines firewalls, intrusion prevention, antivirus and application control giving you real time updates to protect against the latest and most persistent threats.
Supporting a growing trust? See how we work with multi-academy trusts.
Filtering, Monitoring & Safeguarding
We pride ourselves on providing our schools and MATs with industry leading Filtering, Monitoring and Safeguarding solutions, ensuring the most advanced protection and monitoring available to your school. As an AIT client, you’ll not only benefit from filtering solutions to support your school’s Prevent Duty compliance, but you’ll also receive our praised KCSIE 23 Training on Filtering & Monitoring, tailored to both DSLs and your school team. Our monitoring solutions come with a whole host of options to enhance pastoral care, using AI technology combined with human review team.
Full detail on our approach: Safeguarding and Filtering.
CONNECTIVITY WITHOUT THE GUESSWORK
Uptime you can see, not take on trust
Most broadband providers ask schools to take reliability on faith. We’d rather show our working. Every AIT connection is monitored around the clock from our own UK datacentres, and our public service status page tells you — before you’ve picked up the phone — whether an issue is at your site, on the carrier network, or already being worked on. If a line drops at 7:40am, your office team can check the status page from a phone in seconds, and in most cases we’re already on it: our monitoring typically flags a line fault before the school does.
That visibility carries through to how faults are handled. Connectivity issues are triaged against our published ticket priorities, so a school-wide outage is treated as exactly what it is — a critical incident — and never sits in a general queue behind a printer job.
- School Broadband NetworkOperational
- Filtering & Safeguarding PlatformOperational
- VoIP & TelephonyOperational
- Datacentre CoreOperational
The reporting that keeps us honest
Fast broadband is only half the promise — the other half is what happens when something goes wrong. Every AIT school gets access to Helpdesk Reporting, our own reporting platform, included with our service, not sold on top. It’s how heads, business managers and trust IT leads see exactly how we’re performing against the response and resolution targets we’ve agreed:
- The Executive overview gives leadership a single page on service health — how many tickets were raised, how quickly they were answered, and how many were resolved within target — without wading through helpdesk exports.
- KPI Insights breaks performance down by category, so you can see connectivity incidents on their own: for example, that a term produced 14 connectivity tickets with an average first response of 11 minutes (illustrative figures — your reports show your school’s own data).
- Per-trust filters let a MAT compare service across every school on its network from one login — useful when you’re reporting to trustees on whether centralising broadband actually improved things.
- The AI Assistant answers plain-English questions like “how many internet outages did we log last term, and how long did each one last?” — no report-building required.
- Training insights show which staff have completed connectivity- and safeguarding-related training, closing the loop between the technology and the people using it.
We publish our targets, we report against them, and you hold the evidence. That’s what “fully managed” should mean. See how the same transparency runs through our IT support for schools.
Illustrative demo data
WE KNOW EDUCATION
Choosing the right broadband partner
AIT have been delivering specialist solutions to the education sector since 2000, and we are renowned for our personal approach, understanding and innovative solutions.
Thanks to our two wholly owned UK datacentres, we’ve built our core infrastructure purposely for the education sector, meaning we can control our carrier-grade platform and maintain all central resources. Unlike some internet providers, that means we aren’t reliant on third-party providers, so you’ll benefit from quick support from our engineers.
We are really proud to support our schools in supporting them meeting DfE guidelines for broadband, security and safeguarding.
Today that means 249 schools and 20 trusts across the UK, supported by a 75-strong team who handle everything from the first site survey to the cabling in the walls and the phones on the desks.
Regulatory Compliance
We have everything you need to meet DfE guidelines for broadband, security and safeguarding. Our filtering service supports full compliance with the following requirements:
- Prevent Duty
- Keeping Children Safe in Education
- Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) Block List and Image Hash List
- Home Office Terrorism Block List
- UK Safer Internet Centre
Already with us? Everything lives in one place
Existing AIT schools sign in through the Customer Portal — one login hub for all four of our platforms: AIT Horizon for leadership dashboards, Helpdesk Reporting for service performance, AIT Atlas for project and engineering visibility, and AIT Ordering for quotes, purchase orders and delivery tracking. If your broadband upgrade involves new hardware, Ordering lets your office track it from quote to purchase order to delivery without a single chasing email.
School broadband — your questions answered
The DfE’s digital connectivity standards recommend a full-fibre connection, with primary schools using at least 100Mbps download / 30Mbps upload and secondary schools, all-through schools and further education colleges using a connection of 1Gbps download and upload. In practice the right speed depends on your pupil numbers, device count and how much of your curriculum runs in the cloud — which is exactly what our survey establishes before we quote. Every connection we propose is specified against the current DfE standards, and larger sites can scale up to dedicated gigabit-class lines; see our internet and leased lines for schools page for the options.
Yes — this is one of the most common projects we run. We plan migrations around the school calendar, typically installing and testing the new line in parallel with your existing service so the switchover itself happens out of hours or during a holiday. Your old service is only ceased once the new connection is proven, and where timescales are tight we can provide an interim connection so teaching is never left offline.
Filtering, monitoring and safeguarding are part of the managed service, not a bolt-on. Your connection arrives with filtering configured to support Prevent Duty and Keeping Children Safe in Education compliance, and your DSL gets reporting tools and training to match. The full detail is on our Safeguarding and Filtering page.
Three ways, before you’ve had to ask. Our monitoring watches every line around the clock and usually raises the fault before the school notices; our public service status page shows current service health at any time; and connectivity outages are handled under our published ticket priorities, so a whole-school outage is triaged as a critical incident. Afterwards, the incident, our response time and the resolution are all visible to your leadership team in Helpdesk Reporting — so you never have to take our word for how it was handled.
Yes. We build trust-wide Wide Area Networks that bring every school onto one estate, with centrally managed firewalls and filtering policies and a single renewal date instead of a drawer full of mismatched contracts. Trust IT leads get per-school visibility across the whole network through Helpdesk Reporting’s per-trust filters, and co-terminous contracts mean procurement is done once, properly. Start with our multi-academy trusts page.
LETS TALK
Get in touch
We understand the unique needs and challenges that are faced by schools, and we are all about finding a solution that works for you. Get in touch with our friendly team to have a chat about how we can support you on your digital journey.