School IT does not retire on a tidy schedule. The refresh happens when the funding lands, and it has to be finished before the pupils come back. The kit it replaced then sits in a store cupboard behind the hall, because nobody has time to work out what to do with it and nobody wants to be the person who binned a laptop with safeguarding records on it.
Collections that fit the school calendar
We cover Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, Northamptonshire and Warwickshire, so a visit is a short drive rather than a slot in someone's national routing schedule.
Half term, INSET days, the summer break, or after the last bell on a Friday - tell us when the building is quiet and that is when we come. We do the lifting and the logging, as on any IT asset recovery collection.
Collection is free where the resale value in the load covers it, and priced before we book a date where it does not.
Safeguarding data, not just staff data
Staff laptops are the ones that matter. Safeguarding logs, SEN records, medical notes, pupil premium spreadsheets and years of email sit on those drives long after the machine stops being useful. Pupil devices hold less, but still hold cached documents, saved credentials and photographs.
We never open, index or list any of it. Erasure comes first, before anything else is done to the machine, by the method set out under certified data destruction.
Evidence your data protection lead can file
You get a manifest of what left the site and a Certificate of Data Erasure for every drive.
That is what a DPO needs on file: a named drive, a named method, a date. It is also the answer when a governor asks what happened to the old ICT suite. We are registered with the ICO as a data controller.
Trusts running several sites
If procurement sits centrally but the kit sits in eight different offices, the records end up in eight places too. We work site by site and report back centrally, so the trust holds one set of manifests and certificates rather than chasing each school for photographs of serial numbers.
If it is easier, start with the school with the worst cupboard and use it as the template for the rest.
Money that goes back into the budget
Anything with resale value is refurbished and resold, and the value credited back to you. Three or four-year-old staff laptops usually carry value. Ageing desktops, dead interactive panels and anything with a swollen battery usually do not.
We tell you which is which before we take it, so the bursar is working from a figure rather than a hope.
The cupboard nobody has opened since 2019
Kit from two or three refreshes back is the awkward pile. Nothing was recorded when it went in, so you cannot show what was on it or that it was dealt with.
It gets treated exactly like this year's machines: logged, erased, certified, removed. The 2019 pile ends up with the same paperwork as the new kit, and nothing is left in the cupboard that needs explaining.
Starting
Email oliver@kiverefresh.com with a rough machine count and the dates the building is empty, or get a quote. We will look at the pile before you commit to anything and tell you what is worth something and what is not.