Students at a school in Warwickshire, England, have scored an extended Christmas break after a cyberattack crippled its IT systems, forcing classrooms to close and staff to summon government incident responders.
Higham Lane School in Nuneaton said it would stay shut on Monday and Tuesday after a cyber incident “took down the school IT system,” cutting off access to phones, email, servers, and its management system. The school said the decision to close was taken on the advice of external experts as investigations continue.
In a message to parents published on Monday, headteacher Michael Gannon said the school is “working closely with external agencies, including a Cyber Incident Response Team from the Department for Education, as well as IT experts from our Multi Academy Trust, the Central England Academy Trust, to fully investigate and resolve the issue.”
As part of the response, the school has told both staff and students to keep well clear of its systems, including Google Classroom and SharePoint, until further notice. Gannon said pupils who had already logged in “should not worry,” but noted the lockdown on access was necessary “to ensure maximum safety while investigations continue.”
With school logins off-limits, pupils have been pointed instead to external revision sites such as BBC Bitesize and Oak National Academy, which the school stressed are not connected to its own network. Year 11 and Year 13 students have been encouraged to use the enforced downtime to brush up for their GCSE and A-level exams.
An earlier note sent to parents on January 3 set out the scale of the disruption more bluntly, saying the school and sixth form appear “to have been a victim of a cyberattack” that left it unable to use “any digital services.”
That message also acknowledged the regulatory implications of the incident. The school said it had reported the incident to the Information Commissioner’s Office “in line with the requirements of the Data Protection Act 2018 / GDPR and where possible within 72 hours,” and that it would work with its local authority data protection officer to meet those obligations.
While the school has not said whether student or staff data was accessed, the decision to flag the incident with the ICO suggests that the possibility is being assessed. The January 3 update added that a risk assessment had been carried out “taking into account the safeguarding and wellbeing of our pupils and staff,” and described the closure as necessary “to preserve the integrity of the network.”
The school is aiming to reopen on Wednesday, January 7, but that depends on recovery work. Students have been instructed not to access school systems in the meantime, turning the incident into an unscheduled lesson in the fragility of school IT. ®