VoIP for education: Unified communications for schools

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VoIP for education

Benefits of VoIP

Unified communications for schools

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VoIP for education

Enhancing communication systems ensures that both internal and external operations run more smoothly, and that everyone is up to date with news, policies and procedures. It also helps facilitate parental involvement, keeps students engaged and improves school safety – something that’s crucial when educational settings retain volumes of confidential, often sensitive, data.

But did you know that your business telecoms platform can also help deliver on other key elements of schooling, such as enhancing the safeguarding and wellbeing of pupils? VoIP for education provides a whole host of features and communication tools to aid better monitoring of pupil needs and make staff more proactive in ‘tuning in’ and keeping a close eye on activities, progress and mindset.

All these features are hosted in the cloud to provide a cloud-based phone system - secure and rich with features designed to streamline communications.

Why choose VoIP for education?

VoIP (voice over internet protocol) technology provides a whole host of features and benefits to improve communications both on and off the premises. VoIP for education offers a phone service that goes far beyond the capabilities of a traditional phone system. VoIP for education has unparalleled features, control, and call management functionality, which offers a wide range of benefits including the ability to have a centralised reception, providing your schools to have any inbound call to your trust go to one central reception. In addition, VoIP for education offers free site-to-site calls so you can unify communications across the trust without any extra costs.

A VoIP phone system offers a fully scalable service, providing flexible communications in a system that can grow as you do. This makes VoIP for education highly beneficial as it offers the ability to scale your system up and down as and when you need to, adding new sites and easily moving from one premise to another if required.

Benefits of VoIP phone systems for schools

There are several benefits of VoIP phone systems for schools and it has been quite the gamechanger for the education sector offering up benefits in the form of:

Improved quality of education

Combining VoIP with a leased line connection enables you to send and receive data, fast. You can choose your speed and typically leased lines are available with speeds from 10MB to unrivalled speeds of up to 10Gbps. And you can rely on the speed of your leased line at any time of the day to ensure your business is firing on all cylinders.

Better student safeguarding

Provides an advanced platform for communications between staff, students, and parents, allowing for better safeguarding through efficient and instant connectivity. With children now, on occasion, being educated from home due to lifestyle changes caused by COVID-19, school leaders and teachers are having to adjust to remote education strategies. While this is happening, it is important that schools continue to follow safeguarding procedures, which can be supported by use of VoIP technology.

Enhanced communications

VoIP phone systems for schools allow for a more flexible work environment, providing the ability to communicate at any time from any location. This has been an essential part of learning in recent years and provides a platform from which to easily share resources alongside the ability to answer calls from anywhere using mobile devices.

Reduced costs

VoIP has a low-cost installation and the license fee is on a per user basis, meaning that setup and ongoing running costs are low and can be scaled based on the number of required users. In addition, calls over VoIP are free, meaning there are no added costs for the number of calls being made.

Divert calls to another site

VoIP allows schools to divert calls across sites throughout the UK, providing the ability to pass calls from one central office location to multiple sites at any time, and instantly pass calls onto the correct point of contact.

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Unified communications for schools

VoIP services provide are a key tool to providing unified communications for schools and is an essential part of a larger infrastructure that uses modern collaboration tools to provide educational institutions with high-quality telecommunications, video, and collaboration solutions over a single network. This improves administrative efficiencies and service levels, while keeping communications costs affordable. Here are some of the key unified communications features included with VoIP for education:

• Classroom handsets – teachers have their own dedicated on-premise handset with voicemail feature, instead of having to relocate to take calls where they may not have all necessary information to hand.
• Paging – real-time notices and announcements can be made to staff and students, quickly and efficiently; vital should an incident need urgent action.
• VoIP call recording – this is a particularly important asset in schools with regards to compliance where some calls may cover sensitive topics and need re-visiting or monitoring.
• Inbound integration – staff are able to take time before answering a call to make sure they’re prepared. This can be automated or manual integration.
• Outbound integration – Make a direct call by clicking the name of any users on a dedicated desktop or using a mobile application, anywhere across the site.
• Anytime, anywhere communications– equipping staff with handsets or devices to take home facilitates better home/remote working and access to the right comms in any given situation. They can benefit from the likes of instant messaging, video and conference calls, screen sharing and much more!
• Auto attendant – callers have numerous routing options to make sure they get right person, quickly and efficiently. In addition, access to a full phone book of everyone’s DDI who work inside the organisation.

This is just a snapshot of the telephony benefits of unified communications for schools and how it can boost productivity and enhance communication both across multiple sites and internally.