Questions schools ask
All of them, with the answers we would give you on the phone.
Plenty of these answers are no, or not today. They are here on purpose. You can only weigh up a system for a lockdown if you know where it stops — so we would rather you read the limits here than find them during an incident.
What Signal 7 does
What does Signal 7 actually do?
It puts a full-screen lockdown instruction on every Windows PC, laptop and tablet in your school, or in one building, from one button on a web dashboard — and takes it away again when you press All Clear. Staff press Acknowledge on the screen, and you can watch the count during the incident.
Who presses the button?
Whoever you decide. The dashboard sits behind a sign-in on your network, and you choose who has an account.
Does the person in the room have to do anything first?
No. There is no app to open and nothing to log in to. The screen appears on its own.
Can staff close the alert screen?
No. It cannot be closed, minimised, alt-tabbed past, or dismissed with Escape or Alt + F4, and the taskbar is hidden. It clears when the alert is stood down from the dashboard.
Can we send an alert to one building only?
Yes. You can target the whole site or a single building. Signal 7 works out where a PC is from its network connection, matched against ranges your IT lead sets on the server — so a PC cannot claim to be somewhere it is not, and there is nothing to configure machine by machine.
Can we change the words on the screen?
Yes. Signal 7 ships a template and you edit it to match the language in your own lockdown plan.
What Signal 7 does not do
The answers in this group are all no. None of them is a sales technique.
Does it lock doors?
No. Signal 7 is a communication tool. It tells people what to do; it does not control doors, locks, gates or any other physical system, and it is not connected to them.
Does it call the police, or 999?
No. Calling the emergency services stays with your staff, exactly as your lockdown procedure sets out today. Signal 7 does not contact anyone outside your school.
Does it track or locate people?
No. Signal 7 does not know where any person is. It knows which PCs are showing an alert and how many acknowledgements have come in — nothing about individuals.
Does it make a sound in the classroom?
Not today. The classroom alert is visual only — the screen takes over, but the PC does not sound an alarm. Someone not looking at a screen will not be alerted by Signal 7 alone, which is worth saying out loud when you plan where it fits alongside your existing procedure.
What about people who are not near a screen — outside, in the sports hall, in a corridor?
Signal 7 reaches the Windows PCs, laptops and tablets running the client. It does not reach people away from a screen. Schools use it as one layer alongside the ways they already alert people, not as a replacement for all of them.
This is the gap the phone app is meant to close, and it is coming soon rather than here — see the next answer. Plan today for the system you can have today.
Does it work on phones, tablets and Macs?
Windows tablets yes; everything else not yet. The client is a Windows application, so a Windows tablet such as a Surface runs exactly the same client as a desktop and is alerted the same way. There is no Mac client, no iPad app and no Android app today.
Our board has committed to building both — a macOS client for Macs and MacBooks, and an iPhone, iPad and Android app that receives the same alert. Both are on the product roadmap after the core system.
There is no release date and we will not invent one. When there is a date it will be on this page. Until the app exists, do not count it in your lockdown plan.
The dashboard is a web page, so the person running an incident can use it from a tablet or a laptop browser today. That is the dashboard, not the alert.
Can we go straight from a lockdown to an evacuation?
Not today. The only route is All Clear first, which turns every screen green — so we do not recommend it mid-incident. Changing directly from one alert to another is with our board as a decision, and we will say so here when it is built rather than before.
Does Signal 7 work if our network is down?
No. Signal 7 runs on your school network, so if the network between the server and a PC is down, that PC will not receive an alert. There is no second route to the screen and we are not going to imply there is one.
Is it a fire alarm?
No, and the two should not be swapped. A fire alarm tells people to leave the building, which in a lockdown is the opposite of what you want. Signal 7 does not interfere with your fire alarm and your fire alarm does not trigger Signal 7.
Does it replace our lockdown procedure or our training?
No. It is the thing that tells everyone the procedure has started. The procedure, the drills and the training remain yours, and Signal 7 is worth less than any of them without them.
Records, security and compliance
Does Signal 7 hold any information about pupils?
No. There is no pupil record in Signal 7 and no link to your MIS. Its database has five tables and none of them is about a child: your sites and their network ranges, the alert messages you have set up, the staff accounts that can sign in, the log of activations, and the spoken announcement attached to an alert.
Signal 7 never asks you to import a roll, a class list or a photograph, and it has nowhere to put one.
What personal data does it hold, then?
Staff accounts, and what those accounts did. An account is a username, a password and a role — there is no field for an email address, a phone number or a job title. The activation log then records which account raised an alert and which account stood it down, with the times, the zone it went to and the wording that was sent.
So the people identifiable in Signal 7 are the handful of staff you give a sign-in to. Nobody else is in it.
Where does that data live, and can Signal 7 see it?
It lives on the server in your school, in a database your IT team installs and controls. There is no Signal 7 account above it, no remote console and no copy sent to us. If you switch the server off, your data is off.
The flip side is worth saying out loud: backing it up, patching it and deciding who gets an account are your IT team's job, because nobody else can do them for you.
Is there anything we should not type into it?
Yes, and it is the one thing we would ask you to brief your team on. The alert message and the operator's note are free text, and whatever is typed there is written to the log and shown on classroom screens. Do not put a pupil's name in them. “Incident in the west corridor” carries the same instruction and leaves nothing behind.
Do we get a record of who acknowledged?
Not today. The acknowledgement count is live during the incident and is not kept afterwards as a per-person record. We would rather tell you that than let you discover it after an incident.
Is the installer signed?
No. The Windows client installer is currently unsigned, so SmartScreen will warn your IT team the first time they run it.
Does Signal 7 make us compliant with anything?
No. We make no compliance claim — not Martyn's Law, not Keeping Children Safe in Education, not anything else. Compliance rests on your own plan, your own risk assessment and your own training, and any supplier who tells you a piece of software makes you compliant is selling you something we are not.
There is also no British Standard and no certification scheme for lockdown alerting systems. We looked for one. If a supplier implies they are certified, ask them which scheme.
What certifications do you hold?
None, and we are not going to imply otherwise. Signal 7 is new.
Can you name schools using it?
Not yet — Signal 7 has no customer schools, and we will not invent any. When a school is willing to be named, we will name it with their permission.
Has it been independently tested?
Not by an outside body. It is tested by our own QA engineer against a written test plan, and we are happy to talk a technical buyer through what is and is not covered.
Getting it running
What do we need?
A Windows server on your network, PostgreSQL (the installer puts it in for you), and the client on each Windows PC, laptop or tablet you want alerted.
Does any of our data leave the school?
In the on-premises install, no — the server is yours and alert data stays on your site. The installer itself currently needs internet access from your server to complete; that is on our list to remove, and it does not change how alerts travel once Signal 7 is running.
How much does it cost?
Pricing tailored to your school. Contact us for a quote.
Still have a question we have not answered?
Ask it in a demo. We will show you the dashboard, the classroom screen and a full lockdown and All Clear on test data, and you can ask the awkward ones while the product is in front of you.