Enhancing Cyber Safety Capabilities at St Margarets & St Aidens

Background

St Aidan's and St Margaret's Anglican Girls' Schools are sister institutions located near Brisbane in Queensland, Australia. Both schools educate students from pre-prep through to Year 12 and share a common IT infrastructure. St Margaret's carries an additional layer of responsibility as it also accommodates boarding students, meaning its duty of care extends well beyond the standard school day and into the hours students spend in residence.

Greg Anderson, CIO across both schools, leads a small IT team responsible for keeping that infrastructure secure while also safeguarding student welfare online.

Problem

Anderson and his team faced two interconnected challenges. The first was cybersecurity at the network edge, which the schools had addressed with FortiGate Next Generation Firewalls for over a decade. The second, and more pressing, challenge was student cyber welfare reporting.

The FortiGate firewalls provided strong network protection but did not offer the kind of granular, real time reporting the schools needed to monitor student behaviour online. Generating detailed reports was time consuming and fell entirely on the IT team, creating a bottleneck that delayed intervention when student welfare concerns arose.

The situation at St Margaret's was particularly complex. During boarding hours the school effectively becomes the students' home, requiring a different and more nuanced approach to what students can access online compared to standard school hours. Anderson needed a system that could reflect those distinctions while also being usable by non technical staff such as teachers and boarding supervisors without requiring IT involvement every time a report was needed.

Solution

Anderson discovered Saasyan, whose Assure platform is purpose built for the K-12 environment. Saasyan Assure integrates directly with the FortiGate NGFW through the Fortinet Open Fabric Ecosystem, feeding log data from the firewalls into an AWS cloud based monitoring and reporting platform.

The combined solution gave the schools a web based management dashboard providing real time visibility into student internet activity, including the specific websites, videos, and online services students were accessing. Key capabilities of Saasyan Assure included:

• Automated alerting. Staff receive immediate email alerts when a student attempts to access inappropriate content or when concerning conversations are detected in chats, enabling rapid intervention rather than relying on retrospective reports.

• Grade level configuration. All alerts and content controls are calibrated by year level, recognising that appropriate online behaviour differs significantly across age groups, and can also be configured separately for school hours versus boarding hours.

• Self service reporting. Teachers, boarding supervisors, and other welfare staff can generate and schedule their own reports without any IT assistance, with access permissions scoped so that, for example, Year 2 teachers can only view data relating to Year 2 students.

• Contextual insights. Because the FortiGate firewalls provide granular data, Saasyan Assure can surface not just which sites were visited but what content was viewed, allowing staff to distinguish between, say, a student watching educational video content on YouTube versus recreational browsing during class time.

Outcomes

The implementation of Saasyan Assure delivered meaningful improvements across both operational efficiency and student welfare.

The IT team saw a significant reduction in workload as reporting was democratised across the school's non technical staff. This freed Anderson and his team to focus on infrastructure rather than generating reports on demand.

More importantly, teachers and welfare staff gained the ability to identify and act on potential student welfare concerns far earlier than before. Whether the issue involved excessive time on non educational platforms, signs of cyberbullying, or indicators of self harm, staff now had access to the data they needed without waiting on IT.

The real time nature of the system proved particularly valuable. Anderson noted that backward looking reports are simply not sufficient when a student is at risk, and the ability to query live data means the schools can now identify and respond to issues before they escalate.

During the COVID-19 pandemic and the Queensland floods, the system took on additional significance, helping staff identify students and colleagues who were showing signs of stress and anxiety during those periods so that timely support could be offered.

Looking ahead, Anderson is focused on embedding the system more deeply across both schools and exploring additional Saasyan Assure capabilities, including giving teachers the ability to block and unblock sites directly as needs arise.