Priority School Building Programme

I was appointed NM at a school last year, the day after it was announced that BSF would cease for schools not at Financial Close.

Since then we have been allocated funds by the LA to refurbish, and now we have applied for funding under the Priority School Building Programme. This has ringfenced funding similar to the BSF one of £225 per pupil for 'ict infrastructure'.

My question is to anyone who has gone through BSF, how was your ICT infrastructure money spent. Was it done for you, or could you spend it? Also what was it expected to cover cables switches servers etc?

Finally were you consulted on where power and data was placed etc?

Any help appreciated.

From what I understand of it PSBP is not likely to have managed services / infrastructure the way BSF had. It is closer to schools rebuilt under PFI where the school had control (in conduction with the LA) of the IT Spend.

The infrastructure (cabling, etc) was designed and delivered as part of the M&E build, but everything else is done under the control of the school and/or LA.

Probably the best examples to speak to are folk in new build academies outside of BSF. Someone like @Soulfish perhaps.

As @GrumbleDook says I'm the IT Director at a new build Academy outside of BSF/PFI that opened about 8 weeks ago.

Everything was controlled by the Academy trust. Being a total new build our funding was slightly different, but essentially network cabling and anything that was fixed to walls/ceilings/floors (so very fancy unistrut based projector mounting arrangements allowing future flexibility of projector placement, ceiling mounted speakers (including the Nuvo amp and the speaker its self), vga/power/audio faceplates and extension cables, all server room and comms room components - UPS (but only where it's a large three phase hard wired UPS with connections to fire systems, sprinklers etc), server racks, raised flooring, A/C, audio cabling in the music rooms) was delivered as part of the main building contractors or the M&E contractors remit.
As part of the main network cabling contract (M&E subcontractors) fibre and Cat 6 patch cables were to be provided in lengths and colours (and in the case of fibre patch cables connector types as well) of our choosing.

The main contract/M&E contractor also had included a series of items that we were to free-issue to them for them to install on our behalf (projectors, IWBs, Plasma tvs, speakers outside of classrooms etc). These items came from the main IT capital, but their install was included in the overall contract cost.

If your lucky you'll get a lot of say in the M&E design. This building was essentially designed around a core IT vision with heavy input from the IT consultants that were part of the initial building design and construction. This has meant we've been quite lucky in that things like projector pole locations had priority over everything and services were redesigned and rerouted to cope with any issues it may cause from an IT standpoint. Even though IT was consulted as to where power and data went unfortunately it was decided before my time and we still have too few data/power points (to the point that we spent a large amount of money retrofitting the building for wireless before we opened!).

Even with all that was included in the main building project there's lot that isn't. Anything to do with our specialism (IT, creative and digital media) was out of scope and had to come from the IT capital budget, and this included anything infrastructure based such as cabling and unistrut for lighting rigs.

Still as a new build academy we've had a quite generous IT budget that I've been allowed to control totally, which has meant that we've been able to retain control of the process and keep things as much as possible in house.

If you want to know more PM me - this is the sort of thing that it's a lot easier to ask questions and I'll try and answer :).