Think about what is actually on those devices. Photographs of children. Names, ages, and sometimes medical or dietary information. Parent contact details. Access to the apps that hold all of it. Now picture one of them left on a bus, or pocketed from a buggy in the hallway, or simply walking out of the door with a member of staff who has left.
If the iPad is unmanaged, there is very little you can do. You cannot locate it, you cannot wipe it remotely, and if it was signed into a personal Apple account you may not even be able to prove it was a work device. For a nursery that is not just lost hardware, it is potentially a data breach involving children’s information, with the GDPR, Ofsted and Care Inspectorate Wales consequences that follow.
Managed devices turn that nightmare into a routine. A lost iPad can be located, locked, or wiped clean from a web page in minutes, with nothing personal on it because it was never a personal device in the first place.
The first is Apple Business Manager. This is Apple’s free service for organisations, and it does something important: it lets a business own its devices in Apple’s eyes, rather than them belonging to whoever first signed in. It is the foundation everything else sits on, and every nursery using iPads should have one regardless of anything else.
The second is mobile device management, or MDM. This is the system that actually does the controlling: pushing out settings, installing the right apps, enforcing a passcode, and giving you the remote lock-and-wipe button for the day a device goes missing. Apple Business Manager establishes ownership; the MDM platform is the day-to-day control panel.
The neatest part of doing this properly is what Apple calls Automated Device Enrolment, sometimes still referred to by its older name, DEP. When a device is bought through the right channel and tied to your Apple Business Manager, it can arrive already knowing it belongs to your nursery. Switch it on and it configures itself: the right apps, the right settings, the right restrictions, all applied automatically before anyone has touched it.
That matters because it removes the manual setup that goes wrong, and it means the management cannot simply be removed by wiping the device. An enrolled device that is reset comes straight back under management, which is exactly what you want from a tablet that holds children’s data.
There are several MDM platforms on the market. The one we use is Hexnode, which handles the things a nursery actually needs: enforcing a passcode on every device, pushing the parent-comms and register apps out to all of them at once, locking a device to a single app where that is useful, and locating, locking or wiping anything that goes astray. The principle is the same whichever reputable platform you land on; the value is in having one at all.
Devices are part of the leaver problem too, which is why this guide and the Leavers guide point at each other. When a member of staff leaves, a managed device makes the offboarding clean: the work account is removed remotely, the nursery’s apps and credentials come off with it, and nothing personal of theirs is touched. It also solves one of the thorniest leaver headaches, the Wi-Fi password, because managed devices can have new network credentials pushed to them automatically rather than each one needing to be reconfigured by hand. Change the network once, and the devices follow.
A nursery that has this right owns its devices through Apple Business Manager, has them enrolled in an MDM platform so they configure themselves and stay under control, enforces a passcode on every one, and can locate, lock or wipe any device from a web page within minutes of it going missing. New devices arrive ready to use, and leaving staff are offboarded with a couple of clicks rather than a scramble.
Octopus 365 has supported nurseries since 2011, and James has worked with early years settings since 2009. If you’d like to talk through getting your nursery’s iPads properly managed, or just want to know where your current setup leaves you exposed, get in touch any time. No hard sell, just a conversation.