Printer chaos

During the last couple of weeks in school I've broken the news to staff that nearly £2000 has been spent on printer inks.

What an obscene amount of money!

The first step I have taken in order to try and reduce this amount is to write a policy stating where things can and cannot be printed. In a nutshell, the policy states that our printers in the computer suites are far more expensive to run and so these should purely be used by the children to print out work. All professional work must be printed using our classroom printers.

But after speaking about it on Twitter I have realised that the problem goes deeper. I mean, what exactly are people printing anyway? What was so important to be printed that the best part of £2000 needed to be spent?

The general message from people on Twitter was that we should be trying to print as little as possible. Indeed one Twitter user is trying to make his primary school paperless. Now, I realise that we are a million miles away from achieving that goal, but we must take drastic steps to reduce the amount of printing that we are currently producing.