ICT ON DEMAND

In 2007 Belvoir High School began to develop its vision for remote learning. The vision was that all pupils would be able to access ICT when they needed it; the same way they choose a pen or pencil. This was described as ICT on Demand.

RE-BUILDING A SCHOOL FOR THE FUTURE

Belvoir High School had been part of the Leicestershire 3 tier system of schooling until the local authority reviewed its educational provision in the Melton Mowbray area. It was decided to implement a 2 tier system, whereby the other high schools and the upper school became 11-19 schools, the primaries changed from 3-10 to 3-11, and there was to be a joint sixth form centre for the area.

As a result of the restructure the school needed to expand: The building was old and bursting at the seams and so the Local Authority secured funds to develop the family of schools in the Vale and Melton. At the same time a bid was submitted to the DCSF for a capital project to develop a joint Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) for Belvoir High School and eight feeder primary schools in the area.

DEVELOPING A VIRTUAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

Following the government’s direction that all schools should have an operational VLE embedded into their working practices, Belvoir High School started to assess which system would best serve the school and its pupils to have a significant impact on its students’ learning experience.

It was agreed that Belvoir would set up and organise the VLE for all its feeder primary schools in the area with the aim of providing new and improved services for the school and the wider community. Their VLE was to allow pupils access to educational support through individual electronic devices; for example access to their own work, their homework, all the school’s applications such as software they may not have on their home PC, documents and other resources. It would also enable the school to provide electronic reporting to parents; a key requirement from September 2010.

EXTENSIVE MODELLING TO FIND THE RIGHT SOLUTION

The ICT team at Belvoir High School had been buying hardware from Equanet for some time before the VLE project was initiated, and the two teams had started to build a relationship. This resulted in Equanet being invited to tender for the project.

Equanet sent a team of specialist advisors to meet with the school's ICT team on several occasions to understand in detail the school’s requirements, what they wanted to achieve, and to assess the existing equipment. Extensive modelling was undertaken around the best way to run the future infrastructure.

Along with the school Equanet explored all the technologies available to find the best solution to help the ICT team achieve their vision. Various options were designed, scoped out and presented, and a solution involving HP Blade servers and SAN storage was recommended and installed over a 4-5 month period. This included 650 new desktops and laptops, and an entirely new server and storage environment to expand the school’s network infrastructure.

Part of the vision was to have access at every desk, but this increased the complexity around management and security. A mixture of Thin and Fat Client, desktop and laptop solutions were introduced with many of the applications delivered via Citrix. In this way pupils could gain remote access to all the resources they would normally have in the classroom at a cheaper initial and ongoing cost basis than notebooks. The software specialists at Equanet negotiated with Microsoft around how the school wanted to license certain applications and product usage rights to enable the rollout of the learning platform. The solution recommended by Equanet offered some key benefits not covered by other IT suppliers. Kevin Bennett, Assistant Principal explains:

“At the time there were three or four school re-build projects occurring in the County. We were the first school to say that we wanted to project manage the ICT element of the building project ourselves, not through the building contractor."

"These projects have a heavy degree of ICT involved, and we knew what worked best for our needs. The solution recommended by Equanet was right for us in many ways. We were able to maintain control in-house which was important to us and also helped reduce costs. We have a small technical team and Equanet assured us that we would be able to maintain the system ourselves. The solution was also very cost-effective in terms of Total Cost of Ownership. In addition, Blade servers use less electricity and run more efficiently”.

Equanet not only designed the solution and sold the hardware, but also installed on-site and helped the school with the overall project management to ensure everything was up and running on time and on budget. 
“The Equanet guys even came on site to help us unpack boxes to keep the project on track! Equanet just made it all that bit easier for us”.

BUILDING AN ONGOING RELATIONSHIP

Since completion Equanet has continued to work with the ICT team at Belvoir High School and primaries, supplying additional equipment as required and acting as a sounding board for new ideas, giving advice and making recommendations.

"The solution we recommended enabled Belvoir to expand their Virtual Learning Environment as they needed to increase capacity. For example, we installed a new Sharepoint system after the initial project completion", explains Ian Cowley, one of Equanet's accredited systems engineers. "We also worked with Belvoir to refine their backup regime to fit with their data recovery and retention requirements".

In this way Equanet has been able to continue to work with the ICT team at Belvoir and develop the relationship further.