Internet for schools, from people who support schools for a living
Most internet providers sell schools a line and a phone number to ring when it breaks. We’re different: AIT is an education-only IT partner that provides the connection itself — dedicated leased lines, filtering built into the circuit, IPv6-ready networking and automatic failover — as part of the same service that already supports every device, server and classroom it feeds. One provider. One team. Nobody else to blame.
Why schools need a school ISP, not a business ISP
A school’s internet connection is not like an office’s. At 8:45am, hundreds — sometimes thousands — of devices come online at once. Lessons depend on cloud platforms that cannot buffer. Safeguarding law expects every request that leaves the building to be filtered, logged and reviewable. And when the line goes down, it isn’t an inconvenience — it’s a lost teaching day.
Generic business ISPs don’t build for any of that. They sell contended bandwidth, bolt filtering on as a third-party extra, and route your fault call to a national queue that has never heard of KCSIE.
AIT provides internet as a school IT partner, not just a carrier. The connection is designed around your timetable, your safeguarding obligations and your growth plans — and because the same team runs your wider IT, a “slow internet” ticket never gets ping-ponged between an ISP blaming the network and an IT company blaming the line. It’s all us, so it’s all fixed by us.
Uncontended, symmetrical bandwidth
a leased line dedicated to your school, with the same speed up as down. Cloud backups, video calls and MIS syncs stop fighting each other.
Filtering at the connection
safeguarding-grade web filtering built into the circuit itself, not sold on top. Aligned with KCSIE and DfE filtering and monitoring standards.
IPv6-ready from day one
your network is provisioned for where the internet is going, not where it was in 2010.
Automatic failover
a secondary path that takes over in seconds, so a roadworks-severed fibre doesn’t sever your school day.
Leased lines for schools
A leased line is a private fibre connection that belongs to your school alone. Unlike standard broadband — where you share capacity with every business and household on the exchange — a leased line’s bandwidth is yours, all day, in both directions.
That matters more in a school than almost anywhere else. A 1Gbps leased line means the Year 10 mock exams running on a cloud platform, the office uploading the census return, and three classes streaming curriculum video can all happen at once — at full speed, at 9am on a wet Tuesday, which is precisely when standard broadband is at its worst.
Every AIT leased line comes with:
- Symmetrical speeds from 100Mbps to 10Gbps, sized against your actual device count and growth plan — not a guess.
- An uptime SLA in plain English, with defined fix targets and service credits if we miss them. (Figures on this page are illustrative examples, not live service data.)
- Proactive monitoring — we watch the circuit around the clock and typically know it’s degraded before your office does.
- A named escalation path to the same UK-based service desk that supports the rest of your IT, on 0115 9170 197.
Because we design the whole stack, the line is never oversold to a network that can’t use it: if your switching, wireless or cabling would bottleneck the bandwidth you’re paying for, we’ll tell you before you sign, not after. See how we build the rest of the picture in network and data cabling and broadband for schools.
Filtered connectivity: safeguarding built into the circuit
For most ISPs, filtering is somebody else’s product. For a school, it’s a statutory duty — KCSIE requires appropriate filtering and monitoring, and the DfE’s digital standards expect schools to be able to evidence both.
That’s why AIT builds filtering into the connection itself. Every request that leaves your school passes through safeguarding-grade filtering that we configure, maintain and review with you:
- Age- and role-appropriate policies — what a Year 3 pupil can reach is not what a sixth-former or a member of staff can reach.
- Category and keyword controls kept current against emerging risks, with the ability to make school-specific changes the same day you ask.
- Reporting your DSL can actually use — clear logs of blocked attempts and search activity, ready for safeguarding reviews and inspections.
- No blind spots — because filtering sits at the circuit, it covers every connected device, including the ones nobody remembered to enrol.
Filtering is included with our connectivity service — not sold on top. For the full safeguarding picture, including monitoring and DSL workflows, see safeguarding and filtering.
IPv6: ready for the internet your pupils will inherit
The internet is running out of old-style IPv4 addresses, and more of the services schools rely on are moving to IPv6 — the modern addressing standard — every year. Many school connections still can’t speak it at all.
Every connection AIT provisions is IPv6-ready as standard. In practice that means:
Every device can have its own address
cleaner networking, simpler troubleshooting and fewer of the odd, hard-to-trace faults that come from stacking hundreds of devices behind one shared address.
Future services just work
as curriculum platforms, cloud providers and government services adopt IPv6, your school connects natively instead of through slow translation layers.
Filtering and safeguarding still apply
our filtering is dual-stack, so IPv6 traffic is filtered and logged to exactly the same standard as IPv4. Some providers quietly leave IPv6 as an unfiltered back door; we don’t.
You don’t need to understand IPv6 to benefit from it — that’s the point of having an education IT partner provide the line.
Failover: the school day doesn’t stop, so the internet can’t
Fibres get cut. Exchanges have bad days. What separates providers is what happens next.
Every AIT internet service can include automatic failover: a physically separate second path — a second circuit on a different route, or a 4G/5G wireless link — that carries your traffic the moment the primary line fails.
Seconds, not days
failover switches automatically. Staff might notice the internet “blipped”; they won’t be sent home to plan paper lessons.
Safeguarding maintained
filtering policies follow your traffic onto the backup path. A failover event is never an unfiltered event.
Sized for reality
we design the backup to carry what a school day genuinely needs (MIS, safeguarding tools, cloud lessons, cloud telephony), and we’re honest about what it deprioritises.
Tested, not assumed
we schedule failover tests with you outside teaching hours, so the first real failure is never the first time it’s tried.
For trusts, failover design extends across every school: consistent policies, centrally visible, individually resilient. See multi-academy trusts.
Uptime SLAs written for headteachers, not lawyers
Every AIT connection comes with a service level agreement that a school leader can read in one sitting. It states, in plain English: the uptime we commit to, the fix-time targets when something fails, what we monitor on your behalf, and the service credits that apply if we fall short.
| What we commit to | Illustrative example |
|---|---|
| Uptime target | 99.9% |
| Fault response | within 15 minutes, 24/7 monitoring |
| Target fix — major circuit fault | within 5 hours |
| Failover activation | automatic, within seconds |
| Service credits | applied automatically if targets are missed |
All figures above are illustrative examples for explanation only — they are not live service data, and your own agreement sets out your actual commitments.
The bigger difference is cultural: because AIT is your IT support partner as well as your ISP, an internet fault is our fault to fix end-to-end. There is no “the line’s fine, it must be your network” — we own both sides of that sentence.
See how your connection is really performing
Every AIT connectivity customer gets access to Helpdesk Reporting, our transparency platform, through the Customer Portal — the same login hub that opens all four of our platforms: AIT Horizon, Helpdesk Reporting, AIT Atlas and AIT Ordering.
For your internet service, Helpdesk Reporting means the end of taking your provider’s word for it:
- Executive overview — a leadership-friendly summary of your service, including how many connectivity incidents were raised, how quickly they were responded to, and how they were resolved. An example: a school might see that it logged 3 connectivity tickets last term, each responded to within its target — and that two were resolved before staff had reported them. (Illustrative example.)
- KPI Insights — response and resolution performance against the SLA you actually signed, broken down over time, so a governor asking “are we getting what we pay for?” gets an evidenced answer, not an anecdote.
- Per-trust filters — trust leaders can view connectivity service performance for every school in one place, or filter down to a single site before a local governing body meeting.
- AI Assistant — ask a plain-English question like “how many internet-related tickets did we raise this year, and how long did fixes take?” and get a straight answer from your own service data.
We publish our performance to you because we’re happy for you to judge us on it. Most ISPs hope you never ask.
Illustrative demo data
Broadband or leased line? An honest answer
Not every school needs a leased line, and we won’t sell you one that doesn’t. As a rule of thumb:
A smaller primary school
with modest device numbers and mostly web-based learning may be well served by a high-quality school broadband service — filtered, monitored and supported by us, at a lower cost.
A larger primary, secondary or all-through school
running 1:1 devices, cloud platforms, online assessment and cloud telephony will feel the ceiling of shared broadband quickly — that’s leased-line territory.
A multi-academy trust
usually needs both, mixed deliberately: leased lines where the demand justifies them, resilient broadband where it doesn’t, and one consistent filtering and reporting layer across the lot.
The first step is always the same: we look at what your school actually uses — device counts, platforms, peak-time demand — and recommend the connection that fits, with the growth headroom to stay fitting. If that’s the cheaper option, we’ll say so.
Switching to AIT without losing a school day
Schools stay on poor connections for one reason: fear of the switchover. Here’s how we remove it.
Typical end-to-end time from order to live service is around 45–90 working days, most of which is carrier lead time — which is exactly why the conversation is worth having a term before your renewal. (Timescale illustrative; confirmed per site at survey.)
Review
we audit your current connection, contract end dates, filtering arrangement and real usage. If you’re mid-contract, we’ll tell you the honest economics of switching now versus at renewal.
Design
we size the new circuit, filtering policy and failover around your school, and give you a plain-English proposal a business manager can take to governors.
Build in parallel
the new line is installed and tested alongside your existing one. Nothing is switched off until its replacement is proven.
Switch out of hours
cutover happens in an evening, weekend or holiday window agreed with you. Staff arrive to a faster connection, not a surprise.
Supported for life
from day one, the connection is monitored around the clock and covered by the same service desk as the rest of your IT: 0115 9170 197.
Part of a complete education IT service
Connectivity is strongest when it’s designed with everything it carries. As a full-service, UK-wide education IT partner, AIT joins your internet up with:
IT support for schools
the service desk and engineers behind the line, with SLA transparency through Helpdesk Reporting.
Safeguarding and filtering
filtering, monitoring and DSL-ready reporting that meet KCSIE and DfE standards.
Broadband for schools
our standard connectivity service, for schools where a leased line isn’t the right fit yet.
VoIP for schools
cloud telephony that runs beautifully on a connection designed to carry it.
Network and data cabling
the infrastructure that turns bandwidth at the wall into bandwidth in the classroom.
Multi-academy trusts
trust-wide connectivity strategy, procurement and reporting in one place.
FAQs
Broadband is a shared service: your school’s traffic travels over infrastructure used by other local businesses and homes, so speeds vary with everyone else’s demand and are usually much slower upstream than down. A leased line is a private fibre circuit dedicated to your school, with identical upload and download speeds and a stronger SLA. Broadband is cheaper and fine for lighter use; a leased line is the right choice once cloud platforms, 1:1 devices, online assessment or VoIP make the connection genuinely lesson-critical. We provide both — and we’ll tell you honestly which your school needs.
No — filtering is built into our connectivity service, not sold on top. Every connection we provide is filtered to safeguarding standards aligned with KCSIE and the DfE’s filtering and monitoring guidance, covering IPv6 as well as IPv4, with policies tailored by age and role and reporting your DSL can use as inspection evidence. If you already have a filtering product you’re contracted to, we’ll integrate with it until you’re free to simplify.
Three things, in order. First, our monitoring flags the fault — often before anyone on site notices — and an engineer starts work against your SLA’s response target. Second, if you’ve taken failover, your traffic moves automatically to the backup path within seconds, with filtering still applied, so teaching continues. Third, we keep you informed until the primary line is restored and confirm the fix with you. You can review how any incident was handled afterwards in Helpdesk Reporting via the Customer Portal.
Typically around 45–90 working days from order to live service, depending on the carrier and any construction work needed to bring fibre to your building — an example figure, confirmed for your site at survey. The practical advice: start the conversation at least a term before your current contract ends. We manage the whole process, install in parallel with your existing line, and switch over out of teaching hours so the school day is never interrupted.
Yes. At minimum, we’ll note your renewal date and review your options in good time — connectivity lead times mean the best switches are planned a term or more ahead. In some cases, the savings or the service gap justify moving before renewal, and we’ll show you that maths honestly rather than pushing you either way. Call 0115 9170 197 and we’ll take a look at your current agreement with you.
Get internet your school can build on
Since 2000, AIT has grown into a 75-strong team supporting 249 schools and 20 trusts across the UK — and our connectivity service exists because those schools asked for an internet provider that thinks like their IT partner. Whether your contract renews next month or next year, the right time to plan a better connection is now.