INTRODUCTION
Rainhill High School is widely recognised as a successful school with 1400 pupils, over 200 of whom are in the thriving sixth form. The school achieves excellent examination results at GCSE and 'A' level and many of the pupils also benefit from a wide range of extra-curricular activities. Students and Staff are provided with an IT infrastructure that supports the curriculum including 400 PC’s delivering a wide range of applications.
BACKGROUND
Rainhill High School had always achieved excellent examination results through traditional teaching methods and IT had previously been an area of under-investment. In 2005 the new Head Teacher set about changing this by developing plans to enable Rainhill High School to become a Media and Arts College. One of his first major changes was to introduce new Head of IT; Mr. Philip Smith. Having worked with SICL in the past Mr. Smith approached SICL with a view to developing a plan for the future of the network. Rainhill High School engaged SICL in a series of consultative discussions with a view to assessing three key areas:
- Analysis of existing equipment
- Analysis of current issues and requirements of the system
- Analysis of future requirements of the system
After analysing these three key areas SICL was able to produce a design that would fully enable the IT system to encompass the planned expansion, eliminate the existing shortfalls of the system and plan for future growth and advanced applications.
APPROACH
SICL provided Rainhill High School with additional Cat-5 cabling. SICL also provided redundant, highspeed, fibre links to the new areas and additional high-speed fibre links to areas which did not have redundant links. This ensured improvement to the reliability of the network. SICL replaced the core of the network with a true layer three HP ProCurve 5300xl 8 bay chassis routing switch and implemented Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs) across the network to segregate the admin and curriculum data networks enhancing the security of the networking.
RESULTS
The Project has provided Rainhill High School with a network capable of processing more information at faster speeds. The network is now more resilient and more reliable as a result. The solution was cost effective and made use of the existing hardware whilst VLAN’s were enabled to increase the security of the network.
“As a tried and trusted network solutions partner I engaged SICL to assist me with the development of the network in order to iron out some minor, inherited issues and provide a sound basis for the development of ICT at Rainhill. SICL Technical Consultants were able to design and implement a solution which has increased the reliability, security and performance of the network and ensure we are in a good position to develop our ICT further, in accordance with our Media and Arts College status”
Philip Smith
IT Manager, Rainhill High School.