VoIP in schools: what you gain besides the savings

From a physical phone system to one that can adapt to the school

For many years, a school's telephony has been built around a physical phone system (PBX), usually installed at reception, in the school office or in the comms rack. Each phone was connected by its own cabling, and the capacity of the installation depended, among other things, on the number of extensions the PBX itself supported. These systems have given trouble-free service and, as long as nothing needs changing, go practically unnoticed.

Problems tend to appear precisely when the school needs to make changes. An office moves, someone new joins the administration team, an extra extension has to be created or a call diversion changed, and it becomes necessary to track down the maintenance contractor, check documentation that is sometimes out of date and book a call-out. A job that should be technically simple can end up needing a visit. With a virtual or IP phone system, many of these changes are made from a management platform and no longer depend on where each phone physically is.

A virtual phone system gives you a different way of deciding how calls come in, who answers them, what happens when someone is not in their office or how several buildings of the same school communicate. For a school, where needs change constantly during the year, that flexibility ends up mattering far more than it seems when comparing two quotes.

The copper switch-off has sped up a transition that was already under way

For years it was possible to keep a traditional phone system simply because it still worked and there was no urgent reason to replace it. That situation has changed. According to data from the National Markets and Competition Commission (CNMC), the last 661 copper exchanges in Spain were switched off on 27 May 2025, completing a process that began in 2014 on a network that had once had more than 8,500 active exchanges.

That does not mean every analogue phone stopped working overnight, because there are solutions that allow certain equipment to keep running over the new connections. But it does mean that the infrastructure on which much of traditional telephony was built has changed for good. For many schools, then, the question is no longer so much whether they will have to modernise their phones at some point, but how to use that change to decide which system they want for the coming years.

Migrating just to reproduce exactly what was there before means missing a good opportunity. If the school has to review its telephony, it is worth looking at what needs it currently has and which of them can be met better with an IP solution.

An extension no longer has to be tied to an office

In a traditional installation, the extension is closely tied to the physical point where the cable ends. The head's phone sits in a particular office and, if the person who needs to answer it is somewhere else in the school, the phone will keep ringing there. VoIP lets you separate the two: an extension can be linked to a person or a role and used from different devices or locations.

This is especially useful in a school, where many people do not spend their whole working day sitting in the same office. A coordinator may move between buildings, a member of the senior leadership team may spend much of the day away from their office and a form tutor may need to make a call from somewhere else. The same extension can be used from a desk phone, a computer or an app on a mobile phone, depending on how the service has been set up.

That does not mean all staff have to use the phone in this way. One of the advantages is precisely being able to decide which set-up each role needs: desk phones where they are needed, softphones for certain people and a combination of both where it makes sense.

Several buildings can work as a single phone system

When a school has several buildings, or when a single organisation runs different schools, VoIP also solves an organisational problem. Traditionally, each site ended up with its own phone system, its own internal numbering, its own maintenance contract and even different providers. Calling from one building to another meant dialling the full number even though both sites belonged to the same organisation.

A multi-site IP phone system brings all of this together. Extensions share the same numbering plan, there is a common directory and calls between buildings are dialled just like calls between two offices in the same school. For an institution with several sites, this simplifies both day-to-day use and the administration of the service: instead of maintaining several independent systems, it can manage a single platform suited to all its schools.

Teachers can make calls without using their personal number

There is a fairly common situation that VoIP solves very simply. A form tutor needs to call a family from outside their office, during a school trip or at a time when no school phone is to hand. If they call directly from their personal mobile, the family receives and keeps that number. From then on the family can use it to call back, even outside working hours.

With a softphone – an app that works as an extension of the phone system – the teacher can make the call from their own device and have the family see the school's number instead of their personal one. The call remains part of the school's phone system and, when that person no longer needs the extension, their access is simply withdrawn.

It is a simple feature, but in our experience it is one of those improvements that teachers understand immediately because it solves an everyday problem. It also helps to keep work and personal life apart without the school having to hand a second phone to every teacher who occasionally needs to call families.

Everyday changes no longer need an on-site visit

In a school, things change all the time. Someone covers for a colleague temporarily, the administration team reorganises roles, an office moves floor over the summer or the person who receives certain calls needs to change for a few weeks. With a traditional phone system, some of these changes require on-site technical support; with an IP solution, many are made directly from the management platform.

This does not mean the school has to take on the technical administration of all its telephony. It can decide how far it wants to go. Some schools prefer to make simple user and call diversion changes themselves and leave the rest to PenwinEdu; others prefer to tell us about any change and have us take care of it. What matters is that the system allows both ways of working and does not require a technical visit every time an everyday need changes.

The school office can handle calls from families better

Certain times of the school year bring a very high volume of calls: admissions, the start of the year, activities, school meals, meetings or administrative processes. With a simple phone system, several people call the same number, the phone rings and someone tries to answer as many calls as they can. Calls that are not picked up leave no trace, and it is hard to know afterwards how many were missed or when demand was highest.

An IP phone system lets you organise this with call queues, ring groups and opening hours. Calls can be distributed among several people, follow a set order or be routed to different destinations depending on the option selected. Outside opening hours a specific message is played, and the behaviour changes depending on the time of day.

There is also something especially useful for management: the call log. Knowing how many calls have come in, which time slots they are concentrated in and how many could not be answered provides real information for organising the service. Instead of deciding on the basis of a feeling that ‘in September the phone never stops ringing’, the school's leadership can have data to judge whether to put more people on the phones on certain dates or at certain times.

Someone answers even when nobody is there: voice agents

There is a point in the school year when no amount of queue organisation solves the problem, and that is when more calls come in than there are people to answer them. During admissions, in the first week of September or on the day something changes with school meals, the school office phone can be engaged for hours on end. Not all the calls missed at those times come back.

What is new in recent months is that the phone system can answer those calls by talking. This is not the usual options menu, where callers have to translate what they need into a number on the keypad and end up pressing anything just to get through to a person. A voice agent picks up, listens to what is being asked in the caller's own words, answers what it knows, transfers the call to the right person when necessary and takes a message when nobody is available.

It helps to look at it from the other end of the line. A family that calls three times and always gets the engaged tone ends up turning up at reception, messaging the form tutor through a channel that was not meant for it or assuming something nobody has confirmed. What is lost when nobody picks up is more than a call: the matter comes back later, in a worse state and through the wrong door. Answering first time and noting the reason does not settle the case, but it stops it getting tangled.

Before putting one on the phones, there are three questions worth asking. The first is whether you can listen to it before deciding: an agent that will not let you phone it to check how it responds is being bought blind. The second is whether there is a way back when a setting goes wrong, because the voice that answers families is no place to experiment without a safety net. And the provider does not answer the third: where the limits lie on what that agent can say about pupils and their families, because this is personal data, and the responsibility of whoever processes it is not delegated by signing a contract.

Telephony can be integrated with other school systems

When voice runs over the building's own IP network, there are also opportunities to integrate it with other services in the building. For example, certain phone systems can be connected to the public address (PA) system to broadcast announcements from authorised extensions or send messages to certain zones only. This type of project needs to be studied specifically, because it involves issues such as acoustic coverage, each user's permissions or emergency procedures, but it shows how far telephony can stop being a standalone system and become part of the school's overall communications infrastructure.

For PenwinEdu this joined-up view makes particular sense because we also work on the network infrastructure. Telephony, Wi-Fi, switching and other IP services share the same technological foundation, so designing them in a coordinated way simplifies management and avoids many problems later on.

The savings are real, but they should not be the only criterion

VoIP can reduce costs, but the comparison should not be limited to setting the old bill against the new one. The very structure of the spending changes. The reliance on certain physical expansions of the phone system disappears, internal calls between sites can be handled within the system itself and adding a new extension is no longer necessarily tied to installing new cards or physically expanding the equipment.

In return, other costs appear that also have to be taken into account: service fees, any handsets that need replacing or possible adaptation of the network infrastructure. That is why it makes more sense to analyse the total cost over several years than to settle for a monthly savings percentage.

For some schools, the financial saving will be an important reason to migrate; for others, the main benefit will be flexibility, the service given to families, integrating several sites or being able to manage extensions better. Usually it is a combination of all these factors.

VoIP depends on the network, and this has to be taken into account

There is a fundamental difference from traditional telephony: when voice moves onto the IP network, the quality and availability of that network also become part of the phone system. An infrastructure with connectivity problems should not simply have an IP phone system put on top of it in the hope that everything will work properly.

Voice is particularly sensitive to delays, packet loss or interruptions that go unnoticed in other uses. That is why, before rolling out the phones, you need to check that the network has enough capacity and can give voice traffic the right priority. You also need to consider the power supply to the network hardware and decide what will happen if the internet connection is temporarily lost. For especially important positions, such as reception, the school office or the leadership team, it may be necessary to set up fallback mechanisms or call diversions to keep communication going.

This point is particularly important to us. At PenwinEdu we do not see telephony as a service separate from the infrastructure that supports it. Before proposing a migration, we analyse the existing network and check that it can properly support the new service.

What to ask before signing

Telephony is bought with less scrutiny than almost any other service in a school, because it seems a minor matter until it stops working. These are the questions you should have answered in writing.

• Has the school's network been reviewed before the phone system is proposed, or is it assumed to be up to the job?
• If the internet connection goes down, which phones keep working and how?
• Which changes can the school make without depending on a visit, and which not?
• With several sites, do they genuinely share one extension plan, or are they separate systems linked together?
• What does maintenance include, with what response time and who picks up first thing on a Monday?
• Is the cost broken down into set-up, handsets, fees and call charges, or does it come as a single figure?
• Does it include a voice agent that answers calls and, if so, who decides what information it can give and how is it tested before it starts answering?

How we approach a phone system project at PenwinEdu

Before preparing a proposal, we analyse how the school currently uses the phone: how many extensions it needs, who answers the main calls, what hours apply, what happens to unanswered calls, whether there are several sites and which people need mobility. We also review the network infrastructure, the internet connection and the service continuity requirements.

From there we can define the virtual phone system, the extension plan, the desk phones and softphones needed, the call queues, the opening hours, the call diversions and how the sites work together. We also set out which changes the school will be able to make directly and which we will handle as part of the support service. The aim is not to pass the complexity of telephony on to the client, but precisely to make day-to-day operation simpler.

Experience in schools also matters in telephony

An IP phone system is not specifically an education product, but the way it is configured does depend a great deal on where it is installed. A school has timetables, admissions periods, a school office, reception, form tutors, departments, buildings and communication needs that are not exactly the same as those of an ordinary business.

At PenwinEdu we have extensive experience of working with schools, and we draw on that knowledge when we design our clients' telephony too. We know which questions to ask before configuring a call queue, why a form tutor may need to call without showing their personal number, which extensions cannot be left without service or why a migration has to be coordinated with the network and with the school calendar.

VoIP is part of our network, Wi-Fi and communications services, and it is delivered on Penwin Voz, our cloud phone system. The school adds and moves its extensions on the day it needs to, finds what was said on each call in the history because calls are recorded and transcribed, and can leave a voice agent picking up when the school office is stretched. Before any roll-out, we review the infrastructure that will have to support it and prepare the solution around how the school actually works.

A good migration improves much more than the bill

A good migration to VoIP is not simply a matter of replacing an old phone system with a more modern one. It means using the change to improve how the school communicates: calls reaching the people they should reach, the school office being able to organise its call answering better, several sites working as a single system and teachers being able to contact families without using their personal number.