Cyber Security Audits for Schools
Know exactly where your school stands — before an attacker finds out for you.
A cyber security audit from AITN gives your school or trust a plain-English picture of its defences: what’s strong, what’s exposed, and what to fix first. We’ve supported UK schools since 2000, and every audit is carried out by education specialists who understand classrooms, MIS systems and safeguarding duties — not just servers.
You’ll get a governor-ready report, a prioritised remediation plan with realistic costs, and — because you shouldn’t need a filing cabinet to stay secure — every finding tracked live in AIT Horizon, included with our service, not sold on top.
Trusted by schools across the UK
Why schools are booking cyber security audits now
Schools hold exactly what attackers want — personal data on children and staff, payroll systems, and networks that stay switched on through every holiday. And the pressure to prove you’re on top of it keeps growing:
DfE cyber security standards.
The Department for Education’s digital and technology standards expect schools to assess cyber risk, protect accounts with multi-factor authentication, and have tested recovery plans. An audit shows you exactly where you meet the standards and where you don’t.
Keeping Children Safe in Education.
KCSIE makes online safety and data protection a whole-school safeguarding matter. Governors are expected to ask hard questions about cyber risk — an audit gives your leadership team the evidence to answer them.
Cyber insurance and the RPA.
Whether you’re covered by the DfE’s Risk Protection Arrangement or a commercial policy, insurers increasingly expect proof of basic cyber hygiene. Audit findings and a remediation record are precisely that proof.
The real-world threat.
Phishing, ransomware and compromised accounts hit schools of every size, in every part of the UK. Most incidents exploit gaps a straightforward audit would have flagged — a shared admin password, an unpatched server, a backup nobody has ever test-restored.
What our school cyber security audit covers
Every audit is scoped to your school or trust, but a full assessment typically examines eight areas:
Network and perimeter
firewalls, remote access, Wi-Fi segregation between staff, student and guest networks, and how your broadband connection is protected.
Identity and access
multi-factor authentication coverage, admin account separation, password policy, and what happens to accounts when staff leave.
Devices and patching
how staff and student devices, servers and classroom hardware are updated, encrypted and managed.
Backup and recovery
what’s backed up, where it lives, whether it’s isolated from ransomware, and when a restore was last actually tested. (If gaps appear here, our managed backup and disaster recovery service closes them.)
Email and phishing resilience
spoofing protections, mail filtering, and how prepared your staff are for the messages that get through. This pairs naturally with our compromise alerts and phishing training.
Filtering and monitoring
how your web filtering and monitoring meet safeguarding expectations, reviewed alongside our safeguarding and filtering specialists.
Policies and governance
acceptable use, incident response, data protection and business continuity policies: do they exist, are they current, and does anyone follow them?
Physical and operational security
server room access, visitor device controls, and the everyday habits that quietly undo technical defences.
How the audit works
Scoping call.
A short conversation with your headteacher, business manager or trust IT lead. We agree what’s in scope — a single school, a sample of schools, or a whole trust — and arrange access. No two-hundred-question spreadsheet to fill in first.
Evidence gathering.
Our engineers review your systems remotely and on site: configurations, account privileges, patch status, backup jobs, filtering policies and documentation. We work around the school day, so teaching is never interrupted.
Staff-side checks.
Security fails at the human layer more often than the technical one. We review joiner/leaver processes, admin habits and awareness levels — respectfully, and without naming individuals in any report.
Findings and RAG rating.
Every finding is rated red, amber or green, written in plain English, and paired with a specific, practical fix. As an illustration, a typical first audit surfaces around 25–40 findings — usually a handful of urgent reds, a longer tail of ambers, and plenty of reassuring greens.
Debrief and plan.
We present the results to your leadership team — one session for technical staff, one pitched for governors and SLT — and leave you with a prioritised, costed remediation plan you can act on with us or with anyone else.
What you receive
- A plain-English audit report written for school leaders, with a technical appendix for IT staff
- A RAG-rated findings register — every issue, its risk level, and its fix
- A prioritised remediation plan with realistic, budget-aware costings
- A governor-ready summary you can table at your next meeting without translation
- Mapping against the DfE cyber security standards and Cyber Essentials controls, so you can see your compliance position at a glance
- Every finding loaded into AIT Horizon — so the audit becomes a living plan, not a PDF in a drawer
Your audit lives on in AIT Horizon
Most audit reports are read once and shelved. Ours are loaded into AIT Horizon, the leadership platform included with our service — not sold on top — so the work of fixing things actually gets tracked.
The RAG compliance tracker takes every audit finding and holds it as a live red, amber or green item. When a red is resolved — MFA rolled out to office staff, say — it turns green in the tracker, and your evidence trail builds itself. Governors asking “what happened after the audit?” get an answer on screen, not a shrug.
IT Finance turns findings into a fundable plan. Big remediation items — an ageing firewall, servers past their patch window, a switch estate due for refresh — drop into Horizon’s IT Finance module, with 5-year projections across hardware refresh and software licensing. To take an illustrative example: a school facing a £12,000 firewall and switching replacement can see it planned across financial years alongside its existing refresh cycle, instead of discovering it as an emergency in a budget it’s already set.
Policies and the strategy roadmap keep it moving. Updated incident response and acceptable use policies produced during the audit sit in Horizon’s policies area, dated and versioned. Longer-term recommendations — network segmentation, a move to cloud backup — take their place on your strategy roadmap, so this year’s audit shapes the next three years of decisions, not just next term’s.
The right view for the right people. Horizon’s Executive view gives trust leaders the cross-estate compliance picture; the Schools view shows each head their own site’s position; the Support view keeps the day-to-day fix list in front of the people doing the work. Existing customers reach Horizon — along with Helpdesk Reporting, AIT Atlas and AIT Ordering — through the Customer Portal.
Illustrative demo data
Built around the standards schools are measured against
Our audit framework is mapped to the guidance your school is actually judged by:
DfE cyber security standards
part of the department’s digital and technology standards for schools and colleges
Cyber Essentials
findings are mapped to the five Cyber Essentials control themes, giving you a head start if certification is your next step
KCSIE
online safety, filtering and monitoring expectations reviewed in their safeguarding context
NCSC guidance for schools
practical recommendations aligned with the National Cyber Security Centre’s education advice
UK GDPR
data handling and breach-readiness reviewed with your data protection obligations in mind
Auditing a multi-academy trust?
Trust-wide security is only as strong as the least-defended school in the estate. We audit multi-academy trusts as a single engagement: consistent methodology across every school, one consolidated findings register, and per-school RAG positions side by side in Horizon’s Executive view. Central teams see instantly which schools share the same amber — and fix it once, trust-wide, instead of twenty times. With 20 trusts among the 249 schools we support across the UK, it’s a picture we build every week.
One audit, one connected security plan
A cyber security audit is one spoke of a complete security posture. Explore the rest of the cluster:
School IT security
the full picture of how we defend schools
Safeguarding and filtering
KCSIE-ready filtering and monitoring
Managed backup and disaster recovery
the safety net your audit will test
Compromise alerts and phishing training
hardening the human layer
IT vision and digital strategy
turning audit findings into a long-term roadmap
IT support for schools
the day-to-day team that carries the fixes through
Frequently asked questions
For a single school, evidence gathering typically takes one to two days on site plus remote analysis, with your report delivered shortly afterwards — as an illustration, most single-school audits complete within two to three weeks of the scoping call. Trust-wide engagements are phased school by school so no site is disrupted. We work around the teaching day throughout.
No. An audit is a review, not an attack — we examine configurations, policies and evidence rather than actively exploiting systems, so nothing is taken down and lessons carry on as normal. Where deeper technical testing is appropriate, we’ll recommend it as a clearly scoped follow-up.
Yes — arguably more so. An audit answers a different question from day-to-day support: not “is it working?” but “is it safe, and can we prove it?” It also gives governors independent assurance that cyber risk is being managed, which is exactly what KCSIE and the DfE standards expect them to seek. If we find your existing arrangements are strong, your report will say so.
No, but they’re close cousins. Cyber Essentials is a certification against five fixed control themes; our audit is broader, covering safeguarding-specific areas like filtering and monitoring, backup resilience and governance. Because we map findings to the Cyber Essentials controls, an audit is the ideal first step if certification is on your roadmap — you’ll know exactly what would pass and what needs work before you’re assessed.
Pricing is a fixed fee agreed at the scoping call, based on the size of your school or trust and the depth of assessment you need — no day-rate creep, no surprises. Call 0115 9170 197 and we’ll scope it with you in one conversation.
Ready to see where your school really stands?
One phone call scopes your audit. A few weeks later, your leadership team has a clear, costed, governor-ready plan — and a live compliance picture in AIT Horizon that keeps it moving.
Existing customers: sign in via the Customer Portal to see your compliance tracker.