Filtering and Monitoring Solutions for iPad in School

All schools in England are provided guidance from the government Department for Education on how they should meet digital standards for filtering and monitoring, accompanied by the statutory guidance on Keeping Children Safe in Education.

As an Apple Premium Education Partner, KRCS are here to help schools translate that guidance into real world solutions which provide an appropriate level of safeguarding for iPad in your school. The KCSiE guidance states that “The appropriateness of any filtering and monitoring systems are a matter for individual schools and colleges,” so we can’t recommend a solution which will work for all schools, but we can certainly provide a comparison of the features that some of the industry leading solutions can provide to help leaders decide what will work for them as an integrated part of their schools overall safeguarding strategy beyond IT.

Compare Solutions

The comparison table below shows what’s possible on iPad using a ‘Good‘, ‘Better’, ‘Best’ and ‘Not Recommended’ methodology.

Good

‘Good’ being represented by the built-in tools that iPad provides which, although capable at preventing access to unsuitable Web content, are not suitable for schools because of the absence of any reporting or auditing.

Better

The ‘Better’ solution is Jamf Protect. In our opinion, this is the most capable preventative solution for iPad on the market today, owing to its use of the same on-device filtering technologies leveraged by Apple’s built-in tools. These can block content provided by any installed app on the device - not just traffic from Web browsers like Safari or Chrome - and therefore also cannot be defeated by VPNs. It also offers basic reporting and user activity auditing, with user identification and PII (Personally Identifiable Information) synced directly from either Jamf Pro or Jamf School MDM.

There’s also a deeper security element that assesses your installed apps for known vulnerabilities, which provides more comprehensive insight into your devices’ security posture.

Jamf Safe Internet operates in almost exactly the same way as Jamf Protect, with the main difference being that user PII is not currently fully revealed to admins. While this is expected to change in early 2026, giving admins the option to mirror Jamf Protect’s much more detailed PII reporting, the deeper app inspection security aspects will remain exclusive to Jamf Protect.

Some leaders may decide that Jamf Protect or Jamf Safe Internet fit well with their other human-led safeguarding policies, and that either is an appropriate solution for their institution. Their initial setup and installation can also be fully handled by KRCS, with the customer managing it thereafter.

Best

The ‘Best’ solution is the combination of Securly’s Filter and Aware products, which together will allow institutions to protect children against unsuitable and illegal online content, identify precisely who has been attempting to access that content and also providing assistance in identifying vulnerable children by monitoring their behaviour on iPad. It also offers comprehensive flexibility, supporting all major platforms and allowing educational trusts to grant each school’s DSL only the specific access levels within their purview.

Not Recommended

‘Not Recommended’ represents mainstream app-based Web filtering solutions. These products require that Safari and all other Web browsers are disabled on the iPad, replacing them with a custom Web browser which links directly to a central filtering and monitoring platform. These solutions may seem like they provide an immediate solution for school leaders in fulfilling their obligations, but they have such a significantly negative impact on iPad as a transformative tool in the classroom that we would advise against their use when better solutions are available.

Get in Touch

If you’d like to discuss your school’s filtering and monitoring needs in more detail please contact our Education team or email edsales@krcs.co.uk. Our specialists are available to help you understand the obligations that leadership have in relation to iPad, and how best to fulfil them without negating the reasons why your school chose to invest in iPad to begin with.