Photocopiers and printing for schools

The volume is lumpy, and the contract usually isn't

A school year has a shape. September is heavy. The run-up to mocks and exams is heavy. Reports, parents' evenings and transition materials are heavy. August is close to nothing. Averaged out, that looks like a steady monthly figure, and that figure is what gets quoted against.

The consequences arrive at both ends. A committed minimum volume gets paid through the summer whether or not a single page is printed. And a device sized for the average is the one queueing on the Monday of assessment week, which is when nobody has time for it.

Worth checking on your current agreement: is the minimum volume assessed monthly, quarterly or annually? Annual assessment absorbs a school year's shape far better than monthly does, and it's a reasonable thing to ask for.

Reprographics is a different machine from the staffroom MFD

Most schools have two distinct needs and one budget. Classroom and office printing is ordinary: mono, moderate volume, spread around the building. Reprographics is not — booklets, exam papers, stapled and folded sets, long runs against a deadline.

Finishing is where this shows up. Whether a device can staple, fold and produce a booklet without somebody standing over it decides how much of a TA's week disappears into a photocopier. It's worth pricing the finisher properly rather than treating it as an optional extra, because the alternative cost is staff time that never appears on the print invoice.

Who printed what, and who pays for it

Print management software earns its place faster in a school than almost anywhere else. Per-department reporting turns “the print budget is gone again” into a conversation with actual numbers behind it. Pupil quotas and sensible colour rules stop the sixth form printing a hundred colour pages of revision notes on the last day of term.

Follow-me printing helps too: a job follows the user to whichever device they walk up to, rather than being sent to a machine on the wrong floor and reprinted when it doesn't appear. That's covered on our PaperCut page, which also explains the difference between running it on your own server and running it without one.

Safeguarding and the shared device

A school MFD handles material that shouldn't sit in an output tray: pupil records, safeguarding paperwork, reports, exam material, staff HR documents. Shared devices in corridors and staffrooms make that a live risk rather than a theoretical one.

Secure release — job held until the sender enters a PIN or taps a card at the device — is the standard answer, and it's cheap once the software is there for quotas anyway. Scanning matters as much as printing: if staff are scanning safeguarding documents, where those scans land, and who can reach them, is worth deciding deliberately rather than leaving to whatever the device was set up with.

Exam material has its own rules

Secure storage and handling of exam papers is governed by the awarding bodies and the JCQ, and their requirements — not a supplier's opinion — are what your arrangements have to satisfy. If reprographics touches exam material at any point, that's worth raising early in a specification rather than discovering a mismatch later.

How you buy changes the sums

Schools and academies often buy through a procurement framework rather than straight from a supplier, and trusts may have arrangements covering several schools at once. That changes what's comparable: a framework rate isn't automatically the best available, and an off-framework quote isn't automatically allowed. Both are worth knowing before you compare anything.

Capital versus revenue matters too. Whether a device is bought outright from a capital allocation or leased from a revenue budget is often decided by which budget has room rather than which is cheaper over the term — our guide to buying versus leasing sets out how the two compare once you total them properly.

What we'd ask you

• Roll, number of sites, and whether you're part of a trust.
• How many devices, and roughly where they are.
• Whether reprographics is a separate function with its own machine.
• Whether you're running print management now, and what for.
• Which framework you buy through, if any.
• When the current agreement ends — and whether that's the finance agreement, the service agreement, or both.

How we make our money

We supply print — equipment, leasing and managed print — so if a review points to moving, we may quote for that work ourselves, and you should read what we tell you about your current costs with that in mind. Where we're not the right fit we'll say so. And if your existing arrangement is already sensible, that's what you'll be told.

Related

• Printer contract renewal — notice periods and timings, and why you probably have two agreements rather than one.
• PaperCut MF and Hive — quotas, follow-me printing and secure release.
• 5 signs you're overpaying on your printer contract
• Printers and copiers for hotels
• Printing for law firms and professional services
• Printing for dental and healthcare practices
• How our contract review works