I was recently hired as an IT supporter on a school for kids with autism and other development issues. They utilize iPads and I have no experience with Apple products.
Now, today a teacher came to me asking if I could block access to the printers from the kids iPads. They are printing some rather unfortunate things, and from a brief googling, I couldn't seem to find any option to do so, apart from setting up a seperate network (not a possibility (the teachers use iPads as well, and they need to be able to print. All tablets are connected to the same network.))
Is there a way to do it from the iPad, or do I have to setup passwords on the printers?
Best Answer
You have multiple ways of blocking the kids from accessing the printers:
Depending on the make and model of the printer, you could setup authentication on the printer. This way users will have to enter the username and password for the printer the first time they AirPrint something. This has to be done on the printer.
Depending on the make and model of your network equipment, you can set up a seperate network for the kids's iPads that is not allowed to AirPrint (i.e. has no network access to the printers). Even though the teachers are also using iPads, this can work, as you would still have the ordinary WIFi where the teacher's iPad can connect to access the printers.
Finally, as you indicate you prefer a solution where the restriction is done from the iPad, you can change the setup of the kids' iPads so that they're not allowed to AirPrint at all.
This can be done from a MDM setup, if you have one already. You can then specifically select a number of iPads, and then restrict access to AirPrint.
If you haven't got MDM, you can install "Apple Configurator 2" (free download from the App Store) on a Mac, and connect each iPad to set them up as supervised and block access to AirPrint. Note that usually iPads will be wiped when adding them as supervised devices.
You can find the user guide for "Apple Configurator 2" here:
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/apple-configurator-2/welcome/mac