Chichester High School for Girls selects Brocade

Chichester High School for Girls, one of the UK’s best performing comprehensive schools and part of The Kemnal Academies Trust (TKAT), has selected Brocade to support a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) strategy for students and staff. The network infrastructure upgrade will allow the school’s pupils and teachers to put technology at the heart of education, enabling greater use of connected devices in lessons and extracurricular activities.

The new infrastructure will be based on Brocade’s ICX Switching portfolio, which is designed to deliver unprecedented levels of performance, availability, and flexibility for distributed campuses.

Chichester High School for Girls has over 1200 pupils aged between 11 and 18 years old, and is part of a trust which manages 39 primary and secondary schools across the South East of England. The school relies heavily on its network infrastructure, both in the classroom and to support critical operations such as staff records, financial management and communicating with parents and stakeholders.

To support pupils with research, collaboration and multimedia learning, the school’s leadership wanted to implement a BYOD policy to allow students to use their personal devices in lessons. Although not yet widely adopted, this approach looks set to become increasingly common, with 67 percent of UK schools now agreeing that it is important to allow students to use their personal devices in lessons[i]. However, when Chichester High School decided to implement BYOD, it quickly became clear that its existing systems would not be able to cope with the pressure these additional devices would generate.

Jim Turner, Network Manager, Chichester High School for Girls, commented: “BYOD helps technology play a central role in lessons by enabling each student to have their own device; something that is simply not possible using just school-owned devices. It also helps keep pupils engaged, since tablet and smartphone devices allow teachers to make greater use of video and online tools in lessons, as well as giving students the ability to create multimedia content themselves. However, our existing network infrastructure was struggling to cope with the 700 devices already active on our network. It was clear we needed to build a stronger foundation if we were to realise the benefits of BYOD.”

Having carried out a competitive tender, the school opted for a Brocade core network and Access Local Area Network (LAN) solution. The installation was carried out by Brocade partner Red Centric and included 47 Brocade ICX 6450 and six Brocade ICX 6610 switches. These products are designed to deliver scalability and reliability for evolving campus networks, providing simple and robust expandability for future growth at the network edge or aggregation layer.

With Gartner predicting that primary and secondary school budgets will remain stagnant or reduce over the next three years[ii], cost was also an important factor for Chichester High School. Brocade’s financing package, Brocade Network Subscription (BNS), helped the company stand out. BNS is an innovative capital solution that allows organisations to acquire network infrastructure on a monthly subscription basis. It is a flexible, open way to deploy network infrastructure and ensure that capacity is always aligned with changing business requirements.

“Thanks to BNS, we have been able to get a hugely impressive network at a very competitive price,” Turner explained. “We spoke to a number of vendors and, while their finance offers seemed reasonable for the first three years, they often become costly beyond that. BNS has also given us the flexibility to meet any longer-term requirements we may face and hardware ownership will pass to the school after three years. This helped secure the deal with our academy partners, TKAT, who were so impressed they are now looking at how this approach can be rolled out across other schools.”

Turner continued: “Previously, the network was preventing teachers from making the best use of IT in their lessons. We now have the foundation we need to put IT at the heart of the curriculum. We’ve also seen a number of other benefits. We can deploy policies across the network faster and more reliably. Calls to our helpdesk have dropped considerably because the network is more robust, freeing up time for the IT department to work on other projects. The Brocade solution also gives us the option to quickly and easily move to 10Gb connections in the future.”

Joy Gardham, Regional Director, EMEA West, at Brocade, commented, “Teenagers today are instinctive users of technology. Having grown up with the Internet and connected devices all around them, they naturally expect to use technology to support their schoolwork. Forward-thinking schools, such as Chichester High School for Girls, are using IT to really add value across the organisation, embracing the potential of BYOD to support teaching across all subjects and age groups. A fast, flexible and robust network is absolutely critical to making these initiatives a success and we are delighted to be working with Chichester High School for Girls and TKAT to give the school the foundation it needs to implement these changes.”