Before you start to use Teams in school, it is important to consider setting policies for safeguarding to promote the welfare of children and protect them from harm.

Each school must consider their own policies because one size does not fit all. For example, some schools might be comfortable with students direct messaging teachers for help while others will want this communication in a more open space. The school’s behaviour policy should also be taken into consideration. It is therefore important for IT to involve the safeguarding officer when planning out which policies to apply to users.

Microsoft have made it easier to assign policies to users (this was previously done through PowerShell and still is for some policies – see our previous PowerShell post).

We recommend you create a custom policy for both staff and students. Staff will need changes to the policies too otherwise they won’t be able to do things like delete student messages in Teams (see our previous PowerShell post).

It is also important to remember that there isn’t a single policy to manage teams, it is broken up into:

• Meeting Policies
• Live Event Policies
• Messaging Policies
• Permission Policies (PowerShell applied only)
• Emergency Policies (PowerShell applied only)
• Voice Routing Policies
• Call Park Policies
• Calling Policies
• Caller ID Policies (PowerShell applied only)

For each of these policy types, you will find a Global (Org-wide default) policy which will apply to everyone. Any changes to that policy will apply to everyone automatically.

Create a new policy

Create a new policy and give it a name using the “Add” button.

Apply the policy to a group

Click on the “Group policy assignment” tab (if it’s not visible refer to our PowerShell post).

Click “Add group”.

Search for a group and then select a policy before clicking “Apply”.

This is much easier and quicker than running PowerShell scripts, we hope you find that useful!

Update 11/11/2020: We have been informed that if you set a user’s policy through PowerShell, this group method above may not work for you and you may need to use PowerShell to apply the policy.