Classes cancelled as ‘sinister’ school cyber-attacks rise

Within 30 minutes, she had ordered all of the trust’s nine schools to take all of their systems offline.

“You’re basically telling every teacher across the trust that whatever they had planned that day, they can no longer teach with immediate effect,” she said.

Suddenly, everything from pupil registers to fire safety had to be done on paper, as staff worked day and night over the holidays to get the systems back online safely.

Brockington’s school librarian Elizabeth Elliott says she is now chasing more than 100 overdue books after losing access to her online records.

Even the school’s catering facilities were affected, with the computer systems responsible for taking payments for school lunches also taken offline.

Year 10 pupil Archie said the length of the lunch queues doubled overnight.

“Teachers had to write down everyone’s name and what they got, all the prices,” he said.

“It took about double the time to get through everyone and some people didn’t get the food they wanted because break-time just wasn’t long enough.”