Longthorpe Primary School

Longthorpe Primary School

Contract Value: c.£70,000
Location: Peterborough

During 2012 Longthorpe Primary School carried out a major upgrade and extension to their school including refurbishing the existing school and building a new 6 classroom block.

Playfords were tasked with providing solutions for the newly refurbished school including the provision of new Audio Visual Interactive Technologies within the classrooms, a site wide wireless network, high performance network switches and a new IP telephone system.

After consulting with the school and evaluating a number of options it was decided to use a 65” Interactive LCD Display within the classrooms complete with SMART Notebook Interactive Software. All of the new classrooms and refurbished classrooms had new Interactive Displays installed providing High Definition displays with interactivity with a software solution that the school were familiar with.

The school were keen to ensure that they delivered a high performance wireless network throughout the school for both staff and students that would be reliable and provide enough capacity for the growing number of mobile devices within the school. Playfords designed a wireless network using Fortinet Wireless Technology to provide a site wide wireless network with the capacity to be able to cater for large numbers of devices in use in any single area. Deploying Dual Radio 802.11n Wireless Access Points throughout the building the wireless network is now seamless throughout the building and coverage and performance consistent wherever you are in the school.

To enable the high performance wireless and wired network to operate to its full potential a complete review of the schools existing switch hardware took place and Playfords made recommendations on improving the performance of the network across the school. This included upgrading the existing switches to HP Networking switch solution and providing a far greater inter connectivity speed across the network. In addition to this Gigabit switches have been deployed throughout the school providing 1Gb connectivity to the entire schools data network.

With its increased student capacity and the inability to upgrade their existing telephony solution to cover the new areas of the school a problem arose with how people in new parts of the building would be able to communicate using the existing telephone system. A new IP Telephony solution was designed using an Avaya IP Telephony solution. The newly designed Avaya IP Telephony solution allowed the school to have flexibility with the placement of telephone handsets and improved the user experience. The new phone system offered the school the chance to have features such as an auto attendant to assist with large call volumes at certain times of day and routing these calls to the correct people to reduce the number of missed calls, a digital voicemail solution allows people to collect their messages wherever they are at any time of day and the flexibility of staff to move offices or classrooms and take their phone with them without having to change numbers continually was an added benefit.

The whole project was completed throughout 2012 and Playfords worked with a main contractor builder and the school to organise our works around the building and refurbishment programme to ensure the school always opened on time and was ready for use from handover.