School deals for web security firm Smoothwall

Smoothwall, which has an office in Leeds, has secured contracts with 10 out of 13 local education authorities (LEAs) in the region and will now provide online protection, filtering and firewalls to hundreds of thousands of pupils, including those in Kirklees, York, Rotherham and the East Riding. The cost is about £2.60 per pupil per year.

In addition Smoothwall has just won a five-year contract with NYnet to supply North Yorkshire County Council with its Guardian Web Filtering systems for about 380 schools in the county.

Gavin Logan, director of public sector at Smoothwall, said: “We are serious about the education sector and have developed a product specifically for this market, which is why we have become the provider of choice, seeing off competition from 15 other UK and American firms to win these new contracts.”

Smoothwall supplies its services to over 1,200 schools directly and to a further 1,400 schools via LEAs in the region. It also works with the Yorkshire & Humber Grid for Learning, a broadband consortium that buys in internet protection for 550 schools. As a result of the recent contract wins, Smoothwall now supplies thousands of primary schools and over one third of all secondary schools in the UK with firewall and filtering protection.

Mr Logan added: “Our Guardian Web Filtering system scans the content of web pages in real-time rather than having to rely on teachers and IT network managers to block individual sites which means undesirable material and online games are detected and blocked automatically. Because we develop and update the technology in-house this also means that we can react immediately to online threats allowing schools to always be one step ahead of the online development cycle.”

Smoothwall has a £5m turnover and employs 100 staff across Leeds, Southampton, and the US.