1. Size the board to the room, not the budget line
The governing number is the distance from the board to the furthest pupil. Work backwards from it: shallow rooms (under 6 metres) are honest 82-inch territory; standard classrooms land on 86–96 inches; lecture-style rooms justify the 102-inch line of the whiteboard family. Undersizing is the irreversible error — a board can be too bright, too smart, too expensive, but if the back row cannot read a worked equation, the programme has failed at its only job. Our education page lays out the three classroom routes (board, panel, overlay) against this rule.
2. Pair the projector deliberately
Board-route classrooms live or die on the projector pairing. Short-throw or ultra-short-throw projection keeps the teacher's shadow off the work and the light out of their eyes. Confirm the projected image fills the board's active area corner to corner — an image that underfills the board wastes writing surface; one that overfills it puts touch targets outside the sensing field and generates a term of "the board is inaccurate" folklore. Alignment is a commissioning task, not a first-lesson discovery.
3. Mount at teaching height
The board's lower edge should sit where the shortest regular user can write comfortably while the top stays reachable for the teacher — in mixed-age schools this argues for the board sizes' middle band and, in primary settings, the floor-stand variants the catalogue lists, which also solve rooms whose walls cannot take fixings. Mark the height on the wall with tape and have a teacher mime a lesson before a single hole is drilled.
4. Decide the computing route — and who owns it
Boards are input devices; lessons run on a computer. The durable pattern is a dedicated room PC, imaged with the school's teaching software, updated on the school's schedule — not the teacher's personal laptop roulette. Where projectors are retiring, compare honestly with the flat panel route, which absorbs the computing question into the product. Either way, the decision belongs in the deployment plan, not in week three.
5. Calibrate, then train on the real workflow
Calibration takes minutes per room; schedule it in the install visit, with the teacher's own stylus and hand. Training should be one real lesson rehearsed — opening the software, writing, saving, sharing — not a feature tour. The schools that succeed treat the first fortnight as supported practice; the schools that fail treat installation as the finish line.
6. Plan the estate, not the room
Standardise on one board size per room class and one computing image across the estate. Spares, swaps and teacher mobility all get cheaper; so does the second phase of the rollout. Where budgets phase the programme, the overlay route converts rooms with good televisions first and defers their board purchase to a later cycle — the estate plan in the alternatives guide shows how the routes compose.
The checklist, condensed
- Room depth measured; board size derived from it
- Projector throw matched; image fills active area exactly
- Mounting height taped and mimed by a teacher
- Computing route fixed, imaged, owned
- Calibration done at install, with the real stylus
- One rehearsed lesson per teacher before go-live
- Sizes standardised per room class across the estate
Failure modes we have seen, and their cheap preventions
Deployment post-mortems across school programmes repeat a short, preventable list. The board that is too small for the room — prevention: measure room depth before the purchase order, not after the complaints; the size rule in section one exists because this failure cannot be fixed by training. The projector image that misses the board's corners — prevention: alignment as a commissioning sign-off item, with the teacher present, because "close enough" in August becomes "the board is broken" by October. The personal-laptop lottery — prevention: a dedicated room computer on the school image; every minute of lesson time spent negotiating a connection is a minute the board gets blamed for. The pen that vanished — prevention: infrared boards write with fingers and any stylus, so standardise on cheap, replaceable styli and keep a pot of them by the board; programmes wedded to a single exotic pen spend the year guarding it. The training that never happened — prevention: one rehearsed real lesson per teacher, scheduled like the installation itself. Notice the pattern: none of these are product failures. They are programme failures wearing a product's name — which is why this checklist spends more words on rooms, heights and habits than on hardware. Get the programme right and the hardware in this catalogue — boards, panels or overlays — will be remembered as the easy part.
Budget phasing: how estates actually get built
Few schools fund every room in one cycle, and the checklist approach extends naturally into a phasing plan. Phase by room type, not by corridor: all deep classrooms in phase one (their size requirement is unforgiving and their boards serve the most pupils), standard rooms in phase two, small seminar rooms last — small rooms forgive interim solutions, including overlay conversions of existing televisions that later move to the rooms that need them least. Within each phase, standardisation compounds: one board size per room class means one spare, one training script, one calibration routine. Resist the temptation to buy one flagship room and eleven compromises; teachers compare rooms, and the compromise rooms will be judged against the flagship daily. A defensible alternative that real estates use: uniform boards everywhere teaching happens, with the flagship budget redirected into the computing and training lines that decide adoption. The board is the visible artefact of the programme, but the programme is rooms, heights, images and habits — fund it in that order and each phase stands on its own if the next is delayed, which, in public budgets, is not a risk but a schedule.
A word on evidence and expectations
Everything in this checklist is drawn from the unglamorous end of deployment experience: rooms measured, projectors aligned, teachers rehearsed. None of it requires believing any manufacturer's superlative, including ours — the catalogue figures used here (board sizes, touch behaviour, stand options) are stated as listings, and the deployment discipline would be identical if the boards came from any competent maker. That is the correct relationship between a school and a supplier: the hardware should be specified and verifiable, the programme should be owned by the school, and success should be measurable in lessons taught rather than features listed. Deploy in that spirit and the whiteboard becomes what it was always supposed to be — furniture for thinking, at wall scale.
Finally, protect the programme from its own success. A well-deployed first phase creates demand — other departments, other buildings, a governors' visit that ends with "every room should have one". Demand is gratifying and dangerous: it pressures the estate to improvise sizes, skip commissioning steps, and accept whatever is in stock. The checklist is the protection. Photocopy it, in spirit, for every subsequent room: size from the room, projector aligned at commissioning, height taped before drilling, computing owned, calibration with training, standards held. Programmes that scale by repeating a discipline keep their reputation; programmes that scale by enthusiasm spend phase three re-fixing phase two. The board on the wall is patient. Let the process be as steady as the hardware.