Chris Davies wrote:
Not a SUSE or Linux issue directly, but do any of you have a Staff IT Usage Policy covering the Data Protection Act, security, email and Internet Access and such. We have one for the pupils but we want to introduce a sensible one for staff. Any suggestions?
The school I was at spent quite some time removing all the bluster and bullying to create a staff policy that acknowledged the fact that staff are old enough to vote (usually) and therefore can be responsible to a code of practice rather than a strict set of commandments. The end result was that it was easy to operate and enforce because common-sense actually prevailed. Staff were responsible for the wise use of Internet resources for educational purposes and we ran our own filters and proxies. So far as I know they still use the policy (4 years on) and have used it to my knowledge only three times up till last December with nodisciplinary action needed. We also ran a similar policy for pupils but with parental responsibility built-in (and signed for!) so that we could control student abuse. That was very useful for locking miscreants out of the system without huge wads of parental objection ("You signed to accept that your child would behave...") and was again easy to operate. We did not (and they still do not) allow students to have email accounts as a matter of course. Some sixth formers had email accounts created for them where required for their studies and we did look at using email accounts for the general school from the World Schools Network - since we decided that the legal requirements of monitoring student accounts balanced against their right to privacy wasn't worth the hassle. No email, no problem! -- Best wishes, Derek