Managed Print Services for schools

If you work in or manage a school, you will know how important it is to find the right printing solution that meets your school’s requirements. 

With workbooks, leaflets, reading materials and much more to print, it is simply a necessity to have functional printers in schools that can keep up with the demands of the teachers and pupils. 

Not only is functionality important but in order to manage costs efficiently, schools need to choose a printing solution that allows them to manage their budgets effectively. 

What are Managed Print Services for schools?

A managed print service can provide schools with all they need to run a successful print operation. You may be wondering what a ‘successful print operation’ looks like. 

 The answer is that it gives the headteacher, head of department or bursar complete control and visibility of the schools printing. And it doesn’t just stop there.

Below, we’ll go into more detail surrounding the wider benefits of a managed print service in a school.

Benefits of Managed Print Services In Schools

Functionality

As you will know if you work in a school, printing is truly essential. There is nothing worse than running into printer issues or technical difficulties when there is a class full of pupils waiting for material to be printed. 

With a managed print service, functionality is the ultimate priority. 

With 4 hour response times and on-site or remote support, you will always get the right level of guidance if you run into any issues. 

At Copy Print Services, we do our utmost to understand your school’s requirements so that we can provide a printing solution that works for schools, for teachers and for pupils. 

Cost-effective print

A managed print service doesn’t need to cost your school a lot of money. In fact, it could actually save you a considerable amount. 

If you are currently managing and maintaining individual devices, it could be costing you more money and also more time. 

A major benefit of a managed print service is identifying where your current printing solution is costing you and then finding ways to reduce this.

A print solution provider can find many ways to reduce your printing costs by things such as re-positioning your printer locations or reducing the number of printers you have on-site.

Colour Printing

Colour helps improve how students learn, allowing teachers to communicate concepts clearer with the students in their classroom. 

Xerox completed a survey of students some years ago and 58% of students said they would learn more in science if materials were printed in colour. Link here

One common concern with printing in colour is that it will cost more than printing in black and white; although this is true it doesn’t have to be a massive expense to the school. Via our school specific MPS solutions we can help keep the cost of printing in colour down. 

Printing out documents and a high volume of pages to help with the overall teaching experience is commonplace. One way to help keep the cost down is printing the page/s rather than the whole booklet.

We’re able to help train staff, teachers and even students to better understand how to print some and not all of a document. 

Printing Release

In most environments using a printer or photocopier is normal for a user to click print and that “job” is then sent directly to the printer for immediate printing.  

One problem with this in a school is that it can sometimes be confidential information or information that certain people shouldn’t see. 

Real-time printing can also lead to documents being printed and not collected meaning wasted paper, ink and most importantly cost. 

With print release a document is placed on hold until the person who has requested to print authenticates it and therefore the print job gets released on the printer. 

Great, nothing gets wasted and nothing sensitive ends up in the wrong hands.

Reducing your schools carbon footprint

With insights into your printing habits and use, we can help you to reduce the amount of waste. By printing more efficiently the school will be using less energy and therefore reducing the carbon footprint. 

Things to consider with a managed print service

Type of purchase

As with any school equipment, be it a phone system through to sports equipment there's a number of ways to actually finance the hardware. 

The 3 options for acquiring your school photocopiers are below:

Rent:

Simple solution, instead of paying for the equipment the school can simply rent the hardware. You can find out more about renting a machine in our blog here The benefits of photocopier rental.

Lease or outright purchase 

If you are looking to buy the hardware outright then you have two options; lease or buy outright. 

If leasing then the equipment is generally paid for over a period of time, normally 5 years. 

Purchasing the equipment outright involves paying the full balance of the kit upfront in one lump sum. 

If you have questions about whether you should buy or lease we have a blog with the pro’s and cons, Photocopiers lease or buy?

Number of machines

This all depends on the size of the school really. Some schools might only need one big multifunction printer, others might need two or more. 

We can help understand the specific requirements by coming into the school and completing a full print audit.

We can then provide you with a full presentation of how many machines we suggest, why that many and also where they should go to help with efficient printing throughout the school.

Brand of printer/copiers

It’s really important to make sure you choose the right brand of printer, a school is a heavy use environment for printing. It is vitally important that a machine from a reputable brand is chosen. One that doesn’t wear out in 3 years. 

At Copy Print Services we only work with the best brands available. Those include Epson, Olivetti and Konica Minolta.