I think policies and procedures for student email will vary widely across levels of education, country and education authority control.
I work in a British secondary school - we have around 750 students aged 11-16. Email is part of the curriculum and is also a valuable learning and collaboration tool for both staff and students.
In our area schools have several options to provide email for students and/or staff:
- Pay per-student as part of an SLA to the local authority IT support service. Ours use a hosted MSexChange+OWA. Sluggish, no LDAP/AD integration, no control, nothing.
- Use something like Google Apps. No LDAP/AD integration, very little control
- Do it in-house.
We went with option C for several reasons.
For the cost of hardware alone (in our case, £1,800) we have a single, integrated, single sign-in (important to us) email and collaboration platform (Zimbra) for the whole school - staff, students and third-party agencies and affiliates. As we use the open source edition we have no licence fees to pay at all.
We also have direct full control over it's filtering and access - essential in our environment for the age of the students. Another benefit is that it's always available. If the internet connection fails or the third-party hosted platform has issues - school users lose email access - not a position we'd like to be in.