The Wren School

The provision of security and reassurance to staff, students, parents and the local community. A HikVision CCTV solution which the Estates Team have received training on and can use confidently on a daily basis. The system has effectively been used during a Police investigation as it can be accessed remotely as well as locally.

By streamlining the School systems and processes, we have enabled the School to reduce its onsite IT requirement and now functions with one on-site Technical Engineer and a remote helpdesk, saving the School money, as well as evidencing the provision of a robust and reliable IT solution from Vocosa.

As the relevant Cloud services have become available, we have migrated the School to these with no downtime and positive results. Less demand on on-site servers, remote access, reduced costs and happy staff!

Centralisation of MIS system, InVentry sign-in system, Paxton Access Control, Civica cashless catering and PaperCut printing system to one ID card or code.

This centralisation of staff permissions means the staff members only require one card or one code to access all of these solutions. This makes working life easier and also aids monitoring of permissions etc.

The School has recently built an Eco Building for lessons to take place in. Vocosa fitted this out as multiuse classroom with WiFi, telephony and interactive screen. The School are now able to rent out this building for community use, with guest access, providing additional funding for the School. We are now looking into a solar panel to power the equipment inside!

When the School was built, a digital signage solution was installed but the School’s team was not using this effectively because of a lack of training. We provided training to relevant staff and now they are confidently using digital signage for displaying menus, information at parent events, and useful information for specific groups during the school day.

By upgrading the phone system to a VoIP solution, the School hosts this themselves and takes ownership over the solution. This is cost effective and means that adding new phones and phone lines is now an easy process.

As detailed in the Innovation section of this response, this has had a positive impact on the School’s critical services. One example of this in practice, is when the fire alarm was sounded after a power outage. The School were able to access the registers from the meeting point outside.

VoIP handsets, InVentry scanners, critical CCTV, management systems (including fire evacuation and lockdown) and the external Wi-Fi to support these apps during the evacuation, still functioned.

The Admin Team devices had been highlighted as requiring refresh during an audit and formation of the School’s 5 Year IT Refresh Plan.

To extend the life of the device and stretch the School’s budget, we repurposed the admin devices in one of the ICT suites. This was successful, became part of the IT Refresh Plan, and was carried out again in subsequent years.