BYOD or Loan Pool at Riverton Secondary

Mandatory BYOD has the lowest capital cost and the highest equity risk: with 40% of students on free school meals and 12% arriving without a working device, compulsion converts a household budget problem into an exclusion from lessons. It also strains safeguarding, because filtering and logging student-owned devices requires software the school does not control and cannot guarantee on every platform. The 1:1 loan pool is the most equitable, but $60,000 for 400 devices is about $150 per unit, which only buys low-specification or refurbished hardware, and 400 devices covers 36% of 1,100 students, so it cannot be a universal 1:1 scheme as described. Trolleys are cheapest per student and fit safeguarding best, because devices stay on the managed network, but sharing creates contention and reduces time on task. A defensible recommendation is a phased hybrid: a loan pool prioritised for free-school-meal students and examination years, plus departmental trolleys for the remainder, with BYOD permitted but never required. This matches spend to need instead of pretending the budget reaches everyone.

The pilot's problems are mostly infrastructure failures, and buying different devices would not fix them. The 15-minute login delay points to authentication being repeated per device and per filtering session; the fix is single sign-on with certificate-based 802.1X authentication and a filtering configuration that caches the session rather than re-challenging at lesson start. Ninety devices on one access point is well beyond realistic capacity - enterprise access points typically support a few dozen active clients comfortably - so the plan needs more access points, 5 GHz preferred bands, and a channel plan, not a device refresh. The 200 Mbps link shared with two primary schools must be assessed per concurrent device: if 90 students stream video at 2–5 Mbps, a single classroom can consume most of the available bandwidth, so quality-of-service rules and content caching are needed. DHCP scope and IP addressing also need checking, since lease exhaustion produces exactly the intermittent failures described. The conclusion is that device policy should follow a network remediation plan, otherwise the school repeats the pilot with new hardware.

A loan pool narrows the divide at school but can widen it at home if it is the only access point. Students who receive a device may take it home, extending practice and homework access; students on trolleys only encounter a device in timetabled lessons, so the gap in out-of-school practice persists. Conversely, a device scheme can widen the divide if it is bundled with expectations of home broadband, a quiet study space and parental technical support, none of which are evenly distributed. A strong answer would also note that device access is only one axis: digital skills, language of instruction and teacher confidence determine whether the hardware changes outcomes. The design implication is to pair any loan pool with connectivity solutions, such as school-library access or mobile data vouchers, and to track usage by subgroup rather than reporting a single school-wide average.