Radios, then Teams,
then something that worked.
Felixstowe School rebuilt on-call and incident response around teamSOS Enterprise — and won back attendance, teaching time and a consistent safeguarding trail.
A response that needed a person to hold it together
Headteacher Emma Wilson-Downes took on the school in 2019 with Ofsted recommendations to answer: faster triage, better attendance and conduct management, and safeguarding that staff would actually use.
Every existing route needed someone in the middle. Absence alerts came in at the start of every lesson and the team fell behind within a day.
Our biggest challenge was how to co-ordinate our response quickly and effectively, ensuring the right response teams were alerted, and to have a record of what happened — without making a large dent in our budget.
Headteacher
Two systems that didn’t survive real life
Felixstowe did not arrive at teamSOS first. Each attempt taught the leadership team what an incident system has to survive: a live corridor, a busy office and a staff body with no time to spare.
Indiscriminate broadcasting meant details were heard by anyone nearby, and on-call staff spent their time relaying rather than teaching.
Too much room for error — an issue raised to one person, or to all staff instead of the right group — and nothing that could be automated.
Custom incident types route to the right response team automatically, discreetly, with the record built as the incident unfolds.
teamSOS gives us a faster response. It cuts out the middleman, so we don’t need somebody co-ordinating responses because it’s already prioritised.
Trained one evening, live the next day
It was very very easy to train staff on it, they picked it up really quickly. We did the training one night and started using it the next day. We just told them to bring their mobiles to try the app — when they went home they were all messaging each other that evening.
Split the work, and the right people go
Felixstowe separated minor issues from serious ones so the office team, the on-call team and first aiders each see only what belongs to them.
Lateness handled by the office, truancy by the team who can act
Faster tracking let leadership see the pattern rather than the individual lesson — identifying a core group of students missing lessons that the school has since been able to address.
The ability to split the work helped us focus our staff where they are needed the most. Being able to quickly ascertain students’ whereabouts if they are late for a lesson, and to keep known truancy offenders in school, has been a truly positive experience for us.
On-call staff back in the corridors
Discreet responses reduced classroom disruption and created time for on-call staff to circulate classes and talk to students.
The right kit, on the way
First aiders sit in the main building and a sports hall further out. Medical incidents are triaged instantly, so responders know what equipment to bring, who is going, and can advise staff while they are still en route.
What made it fit
What the staff survey came back with
Many of the staff surveyed had been part of the school’s improvement journey since 2017. These are the changes they recognised.
We surveyed our staff, and they are all delighted with teamSOS. There’s no way we’d go back to our old systems now.
My advice: go for it. We’ve had an excellent response from the teamSOS support team — no matter how many support requests we made, it was diligently and quickly resolved. We even showed teamSOS to Ofsted during their most recent visit, as evidence of the processes now in place for attendance and safeguarding.
See what this looks like in your school.
Book a 20-minute demo and we’ll show you teamSOS with your own attendance, on-call and safeguarding scenarios.
