The client
Sydenham School is a secondary and sixth form girls’ school in Lewisham, London. With over 1,400 students and a focus on STEM subjects, technology plays an essential role in maintaining their high standards of education.
The challenge
When we started working with Sydenham School, they had a reasonable quantity and quality of IT hardware. However, their software was not being maintained appropriately, causing potential security risks.
In addition, their on-site support, while knowledgeable in some areas, was not responsive enough when issues arose.
- As a result, the school was experiencing problems such as:
- Students unable to log in to PCs during lessons.
- Slow login times, taking up precious teaching time at the beginning and end of each lesson.
- Laptops were older devices and becoming unreliable.
- Teachers didn’t feel that the IT technicians on site were approachable.
The school also lacked an integrated IT strategy to support their future plans.
How we helped
The bigger picture
When we started working with Sydenham School it was important that we reviewed the ‘bigger picture’. Just fixing isolated issues would have worked in the short term, but we wanted to provide the school with a robust IT solution for years to come.
With this in mind, we carried out a full site audit across all aspects of technology used at the school. This helped us to identify problem areas and plan the way forwards.
Summer holiday sort out
One of the advantages of working within the education sector is that the six week summer holidays are a perfect opportunity to carry out IT work with minimal disruption.
And work we did!
- We wiped their entire IT set up, so we could start from scratch.
- We rebuilt over 1,000 machines.
- We reconfigured their entire network.
- We purchased 520 new laptops, at an economical price thanks to our partnership with HP.
- And we implemented our plans for a modern, robust, secure IT set up, to provide the IT service the school deserved, now and in the future.
On-site support services
We provided the full time on-site support of one of our IT engineers. This has given the school an approachable, efficient expert, when help is needed. And, of course, they have the backup of the full Heliocentrix team to provide additional support when required.
IT support during the challenges of Covid
The Covid pandemic started to impact the school just as we began working with them.
We supported them to quickly adapt to the situation in several ways:
- Redesigned laptops to make remote working easier for staff.
- Implemented Microsoft Teams to improve remote learning facilities for students.
- Switched the on-site engineer to providing remote support.
- Increased the availability of other engineers, to help staff and students adapt to the new ways of learning.
The result
Sydenham School now have the technology to achieve their ambitions and the support to guide them along the way.
The school have noticed many improvements since we came on board, including:
- IT set up is more robust and secure.
- Students can log in to laptops quicker, so less time is lost during classes.
- Remote working is easier for staff and students.
- Fewer support tickets are raised.
- Issues are dealt with more quickly and easily.
- IT is no longer seen as a barrier to the school’s ambitions, but a way to achieve them.
Contact us to learn more about our IT support for schools.
