Out-of-hours alerts for schools, academies and colleges

A boiler fails in the holidays, an intruder alarm goes off at midnight, the server room overheats. The person who can deal with it needs to know now, not when the site opens. Tocsin texts and phones the right person and keeps going until someone answers.

No card needed for the trial. Tocsin is a product of Espresso Group Ltd, a UK company.

The problems it solves

• Heating and water. A boiler lockout or a leak reaches the site manager or the contractor on call, not an inbox nobody reads until Monday.
• Alarms and security. Intruder alarm calls and building access faults reach the keyholder on duty, with the caretaker or head as the next step.
• Server rooms and network. An overheating comms room or an outage reaches your IT support team, whether in-house or a provider.
• Holidays and weekends. Cover changes every half term. Swaps and holiday cover are overrides on the rota, not a spreadsheet nobody updates.

A boiler fault at 22:40 during half term

1. 22:40 Alert receivedThe building monitoring system emails Tocsin, marked critical.
2. 22:40 Text to the site manager on callTocsin finds who covers that school tonight and texts them, with an email too.
3. 22:43 No answer, so the phone ringsA call reads the alert aloud, twice, in a clear British voice.
4. 22:46 Site manager replies "ACK"Escalation stops. The record shows who was contacted and when they took it on.

If nobody had answered, the next step would have contacted the caretaker, and then the headteacher or business manager.

Set up in an afternoon

1. Add your people. Site manager, caretakers, the business manager, and the contractors you rely on, each with a mobile number.
2. Build the rota. A schedule for each school or site, with overrides for holidays and swaps. A trust can have one for each academy.
3. Decide who gets called. Text first, call two minutes later, then the next person.
4. Connect your systems. Point the urgent alerts from each system at its own Tocsin address, and route each to the right schedule.

Connecting your systems

Tocsin accepts alerts from anything that can send an email or a webhook, so there is nothing to install. Many building management and heating controllers, alarm monitoring services, and server and network monitoring tools can send an email when something goes wrong. Words like "critical" or "P1" in an email subject set the severity, and repeat alerts about the same problem are merged. Each email inbox accepts mail only from the senders you list.

Email inboxes are included on the Team plan. We haven't built a connection to any particular product, so check that yours can send email or webhook notifications. If you're not sure, ask us. Tocsin is not a replacement for your fire alarm or any life-safety system, which must work on its own. It is an extra way of making sure a person hears about faults.

Why it suits schools and colleges

• The right person for each site. Route by school, so a caretaker is not called about a site they don't cover.
• Rotas that cope with term dates. Holiday cover and swaps are overrides.
• Contractors and suppliers included. Anyone with a mobile can be on a rota.
• No app to install. Texts and calls work on any phone.
• A clear record. When a fault was reported, who was contacted and who responded.

What it costs

The Team plan is £25 a month + VAT for your organisation and includes unlimited schedules, phone call alerts, custom escalation policies and email inboxes. Texts and phone calls use prepaid credits, one credit each, from 20p down to 10p in bigger bundles. A text followed by a call to one engineer uses two credits, 40p at the standard rate. Emails are free. The free trial covers everything by email so you can try it first.