-
- Industry: K-12
- Products in use:
- 2 FUYL Enhanced Smart Lockers
- 2 Carrier 30 Trolleys
- 1 Carrier 15
- Towers in use: 2
- Devices managed: 135+
- Length of collaboration: 16+ months
-
Background
Pittwater House is a private K–12 school on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. While it supports students from kindergarten through Year 12, its digital infrastructure is primarily designed around the needs of the senior school.
Andrey Shorin, ICT Operations Manager, oversees the systems that keep devices running reliably — particularly for students in Years 7 to 12, where laptops are essential to learning. Students in Years 5 and 6 occasionally bring their own devices, but the real demand comes from high school.
That demand came with daily friction. Students often arrived with flat batteries and no charger. IT teams were pulled away from core tasks to manage last-minute charging. Teachers felt the pressure when lessons couldn’t start as planned.
-
It was clear something had to change. That’s when Pittwater House turned to LocknCharge.
The challenge
Before implementing LocknCharge Smart Lockers, device charging at Pittwater House was a daily disruption. Students flooded the IT department during breaks to plug in laptops, then returned in waves to collect them. The IT team had to plug in devices, track ownership, and manage handoffs — interrupting their workflow and crowding the front desk.
To reduce the burden, the team first introduced a Carrier Charging Cart. It helped minimize downtime and made charging more accessible, but it didn’t fully solve the problem. Students kept picking up the wrong devices, which, as Andrey shared, quickly led to frustration.
Borrowing chargers added another layer of complexity. Students often requested them through teachers, so chargers were logged under teacher names. When they went missing, IT had to follow up with the teacher — who then had to chase down the student. Eventually, the school stopped lending chargers altogether:
“Unless a student has some weird laptop that doesn’t support USB-C, we don’t provide chargers anymore.”
That’s when the team began exploring smart lockers — looking for a way to automate charging, keep students accountable, and make sure everyone walked away with the right device. They ultimately deployed two locker stations: one near the IT office and another in the library.
The solution
The shift to FUYL Smart Lockers brought immediate relief to the IT team at Pittwater House:
“It took me five minutes to configure the whole thing. Mounting the iPad was more difficult than setting up a complete solution.”
After using the Classic version of the locker, the school later upgraded to Enhanced — an update that proved to be a turning point. Students who once struggled with bay numbers or locker lights now interact with a simple touchscreen offering just two options: device charging or pickup.
Even without student cards, they can type in their ID and collect or charge their device with ease. “One student thought it was scanning their face!”
Because the system integrates directly with Azure, there’s no need to manage Active Directory or assign static IPs. With day-to-day charging fully automated, the IT team has been able to step away from routine device management and refocus on higher-priority projects.
The results
The impact of installing FUYL Towers has been both immediate and measurable. A process that once disrupted the IT team daily — managing chargers, tracking devices, answering constant student questions — has been almost entirely eliminated:
“Student visits are down to single digits per week. We no longer supervise charging, and we don’t hear slamming cabinet doors anymore. It’s night and day.”
Concerns around student misuse turned out to be largely unfounded, too:
“When we planned for this, we thought the abuse would be much bigger. Now, maybe once or twice a week we see minor misuse, like a student charging with the bay door open. But it hasn’t been a problem.”
The school also saw clear cost savings. In the past, 7–10 chargers would go missing each term, at around $40 each — adding up to $280–$400 per term, and often more when time and admin overhead were taken into account. Now that students are consistently using the towers, those losses have all but disappeared.
Looking ahead
Pittwater House is already exploring ways to extend the benefits of LocknCharge to new use cases:
“We’d love to get another tower for casual teachers — right now, they come into IT to pick up a laptop. Having a dedicated bay or even auto-managed distribution would simplify that flow.”
The team is also considering how the system could support device repair workflows. While most repairs are still completed on-site, there’s potential to streamline how students submit devices for repair and how IT manages handoffs — making the process smoother for everyone involved.
-
Looking to simplify device management at your school or organization?