Cyber Security for Schools: The DfE Standard, Simplified

Cyber security is one of six standards every school and college in England is expected to meet by 2030, covering everything from firewalls and backups to staff training and incident reporting. Most of it isn’t about buying new technology, it’s about having the right things in place and reviewed regularly.

This series walks through what the DfE’s cyber security standard actually asks of your school, across four parts.

We start with the most common way schools actually get breached: not a hacked firewall, but phishing, which the government’s own figures put behind 90% of primary school breaches and 96% of secondary ones. From there, we move into the single change that blocks most of those attempts, a real anonymised example of what happens when it goes wrong, and how to plan and budget for identity security into 2027.

None of this needs sorting overnight. The standard asks for a named person accountable for it, your SLT digital lead, working with IT support and your data protection officer, and it’s built so you can tell honestly where you stand rather than guess.

If your school already has good multi-factor authentication and a properly configured firewall in place, that’s genuinely worth knowing. If there are gaps, we’d rather point them out plainly and help you close them in the order that matters most for your budget, not recommend everything at once.