Who are Royal Alexandra & Albert School?
The Royal Alexandra and Albert School (RAAS) is a co-educational boarding school located in Reigate, Surrey. It is one of 36 state-maintained boarding schools in England and Wales, and one of the few state schools in the United Kingdom to educate children from primary school years to sixth form. Most students are international.
Why Cisilion?
Gareth Evans, Head of IT Services at RAAS
“Cisilion are a very reliable partner with good expertise within the education sector. They have delivered our projects on time without any problems. Cisilion have taken us to a whole new level & we look forward to what the future brings!"
Snapshot
The Royal Alexandra & Albert School had an outdated IT infrastructure and engaged with Cisilion to enable ‘The Modern School’. To achieve this, Cisilion designed and implemented an end to end Cisco solution, including LAN, Wireless and Unified Communications, which resulted in stable and secure services to the school’s faculty and students.
Vision
RAAS had a vision, and it was all about the student:
- Enriching their learning experience – creating digital collaboration rooms using video to bring in knowledge experts and skillsets across the globe and providing on demand learning
- Keeping them safe – Using the wireless network to provide secure access to the internet while providing physical location security tracking of whereabouts on campus
- Bringing them closer to home – Using technology to improve collaboration, face time and support between friends and family using specialist video booths/ solid wireless infrastructure to support WhatsApp/ video calls anywhere on the campus.
RAAS want to be the first school in Surrey to provide this future of education experience for students.
Challenges
RAAS had an ageing estate, which was a mix of disparate legacy technologies. This is when they engaged with Cisilion, to explore how we they could use Cisilion’s expertise and new technology to achieve our vision.
How did Cisilion help
- Keeping students safe
- Improved communication
- Enriched learning experience
- Staff productivity, efficiency and retention
Solution
The project has consisted of multiple phases.
Phase 1 – a full LAN refit by designing a campus network
Phase 2 – a full on-premise Cisco UC deployment, including handsets and Cisco Jabber. Cisco’s Finance option was used to make this happen.
Phase 3 – a full wireless deployment to all the boarding areas with some 144 access points to be deployed initially.
Next phases – With the core infrastructure now in place, next steps are setting up dedicated video booths so children can easily make video calls back to their parents at a minimal cost.
Benefits & numbers
After the Cisco LAN, UC and Wireless deployments, RAAS have experienced a number of benefits including:
- Improved productivity within IT department
- Increased network speed and reliability
- Raising their profile and Ofsted rating within education
- Improved communication and collaboration amongst staff
- Enriched communication experience between parents, children and peers through video calling