Building Schools programme awards ICT contract

South Tyneside and Gateshead has awarded a £23-million, five-year contract to overhaul its education infrastructure as part of the Building Schools for Future (BSF) initiative.

BSF is a £2-billion per annum government programme to renew or rebuild the infrastructure and facilities of every secondary school in the UK over the next 15 years. Information and communications technology (ICT) represents between 10 and 20 per cent of the total value of the investment programme.

The North East region has chosen IT consultancy Morse as the preferred ICT bidder, operating as part of a wider consortium led by support services and construction group, Carillion.

The contract covers the entire infrastructure of the schools in the area, updating existing telecommunications resources and renewing existing PC estates, the option to extend it on similar terms for a further five years.

But Michael Beaumont, ICT adviser for public sector IT body Socitm, who is working with South Tyneside and Gateshead on the BSF project told IT PRO the scope of the contract will cover some new and innovative areas too.

"The contract covers everything basically," he said. "It will be a full managed service, but with an emphasis on facilitating anytime, anywhere access to resources. It is also emphasising the personalisation agenda, where learning can be tailored to suit individual children, as opposed to whole classes of kids."

Children will have access to the latest broadband services and PCs, as well as laptops to take home and use for homework, while specialist software applications will deliver tailored teaching supplements.

Beaumont also said smart cards would be deployed alongside state-of-the-art CCTV technology to increase safety and clamp down on unauthorised access or vandalism.

"These systems can be activated by proximity sensors, so kids could be automatically registered when they come into school during the day or denied access to certain parts of the school until they need it," he said.

He also said the smart cards would be linked across various school functions, to facilitate cashless canteens for example and therefore improve the management information available to administrators to feed back into service improvement.

Email to a friend

Print this page

Social Bookmark this article: What is this?

Digg

Delicious

Reddit

StumbleUpon

Slashdot

Google

Facebook