School Vision

[Mark182]

We have had a new head teacher start in Jan. They have been good IT wise. Had a meeting with them about how we are taking the IT forward on the campus (x 2 schools 1 building) We are a BSF school so funding was great up until a few years ago. I am really asking two things. Would you mind sharing your ICT budget (excluding Internet 200mb connection in, Firewall and filtering) I will start the ball rolling we get 25k – 2k for PAT testing. We are an oversubscribed secondary.

After meeting the head and our line manager the school manager and discussing a lack of funding after showing them our rolling 5-year plan, I have been asked to plan our new vision for the school. Therefore, I will give you a bit of background into our network:-

 

Servers - Hypervisors with a couple of nodes & 3.75TB or network storage. Backup solution is microsoft DPM. Installed July 2015 when we built a new domain. We use SCCM for imaging and software deployment.

 

Switches – Cisco Core x 5 3750’s stacked & a mixture of 50 cisco 3560’s and 2960’s with VLANS set up (a lot still Ethernet not gigabit and a lot aren’t even POE) installed 2008. UPS in each cab.

 

Wireless x 2 AIR-WLC4404-100-K9 LAN controllers. AP’s ae cisco aironet 1130AG’s over 150 between to two schools with a couple of SSIDS. Installed 2009. We are looking at replacing with Unifi

 

Remote solution – Microsoft RDS - installed 2015

 

MIS – Sims

 

Cashless catering - live register thumb readers, cash loaders and EPOS installed 2009 (really happy with these and the support)

 

Telephony VOIP - PBX, SBC 1000 and a Cisco 890 with Alcatel phones. A cheap system that does the job. Installed 2015.

 

Printers – Entered into a 5 year lease deal with sharp 2017 and saving over 15k in toner a year with them and papercut (installed 2016 papercut)

 

Projectors – promethean PRM-25. Over 70 all installed 2009

 

Whiteboard - Promethean AB378 ActivBoard 378 Pro 78" Over 70 all installed 2009

 

Desktops – A mixture of dell 760s (80GB HDD) (installed 2008) & refurb HP 8200’s (With SSD’s) over 600

 

Laptops – A mixture Dell E5500’s (installed 2008) and Toshibas (rolling renew) over 250

 

E-mail & cloud – Office 365, one drive integrated with SalamanderSoft

 

BMS & CCTV – On a different network not managed by us.

 

We are moving to Windows 10 this summer campus wide. Currently teaching staff have a desktop in the classroom and a laptop they take home that we hardly ever see again.

 

Current plan this year is replace all teacher dell 760’s with refurb HP 8200’s and replace the wireless. Moving forward I’d like to phase out staff desktops and laptops are we cannot afford to give x 2 devices each and are looking at rolling out tablets. We love the Microsoft serve pro's but they are expensive.

 

I want to also replace having a projector and whiteboard with maybe something along these lines Promethean ActivPanel i-Series 65" HD but they are coming in over £2000 each.

Just wanted some tips/advice from people who are maybe in a similar position.

[hallb15]

£25K sounds very low for a secondary school. How many staff and pupils do you have?

We struggle on £25K as a large primary and we don't have anywhere near as many devices as you. We have approx. 160 devices in total, on two physical servers with 4 virtual. 100 staff and 750 pupils.

We too are looking at replacing our smartboards and projectors with interactive flat panels and have two SMART 6265 units which are brilliant but at £2,400 each we're considering leasing the rest to split the cost over 3 years.

[Mark182]

£25K sounds very low for a secondary school. How many staff and pupils do you have?

We struggle on £25K as a large primary and we don't have anywhere near as many devices as you. We have approx. 160 devices in total, on two physical servers with 4 virtual. 100 staff and 750 pupils.

We too are looking at replacing our smartboards and projectors with interactive flat panels and have two SMART 6265 units which are brilliant but at £2,400 each we're considering leasing the rest to split the cost over 3 years.

 

Thanks for the reply. I did leave out the £3,000 we have set a side for 'IT consumables' Bulbs ect.

 

Students just over 1200 & just over 200 staff.

[Fazza]

Thanks for the reply. I did leave out the £3,000 we have set a side for 'IT consumables' Bulbs ect.

 

Students just over 1200 & just over 200 staff.

 

£25,000 is very low for a School of that size. Out IT Consumables is nearly that alone and we have a very similar amount of students and staff as you!

 

What do you pay for out of your budget and what comes out of another one? i.e. new computers, toners, paper, data projectors, spare parts to repair computers, fuser units etc.

[Mark182]

New computers (can only afford refurb) everything comes out of our main budget. Anything printer related is covered by the lease and then that's paid for out of a whole school repo budget.

[Achandler]

You'll never compare, because th question is really is that a 25k budget you can choose what to spend it on or not. My old work had a budget of just over 45k I believe for a 800 student school.

 

However, that included all consumables and all licensing. So the actual "spendable" part was more like 10k-20k depending on the year of a lifecycle, e.g. filtering for the next 5 years taking a large chunk one year.

[Mark182]

Just doing some work on the switches. 33 out of the 55 are fastethernet...

 

Whats everyone else using, I've been looking at the HP kit that's covered by a lifetime warranty. Any one else have experience of HP's lifetime warranty? I would be happy to keep on the Cisco track but need to find out what supersedes the 2960/3560's we have in-place and what the price range is.

[3s-gtech]

I haven't bought any switches for a while now (v1910 would be the last ones), but when I last used the ProCurve lifetime warranty it was exceptional - new device delivered ASAP, old one shipped in same box and postage paid, very easy process too. Not had many failures, just a couple of SFPs and one switch.

 

Not dealt with the HP Networking warranty yet.

[PotNoodleTech]

Have had a fixed 20k here for a 850 pupil / 100 staff school for the last few years. That was fixed as an increase in budget over the previous budget.

 

Did a 3 year ICT plan and stuck to it.

 

Have had to resort to buying pretty much everything second hand/refurbished in order to make that 20k go as far as possible.

 

It's not enough though (and never has been) as we have 10 year old promethean boards, 4 year old Ipad2s and various other things that are all gonna need replacing, and no budget for it. I've upgraded every PC I can with SSD drives to elongate their usefulness. Over the next 3 years we shouldn't need to buy any PCs so can redirect the funding elsewhere.

 

If I were you I would try and get 30-40k/year out of them for your size of school. If you can get 50k then you can make some real progress. I've always found a concise plan demonstrating where every pound will be spent over the three year period REALLY helps in securing funding.

[Mark182]

Have had a fixed 20k here for a 850 pupil / 100 staff school for the last few years. That was fixed as an increase in budget over the previous budget.

 

Did a 3 year ICT plan and stuck to it.

 

Have had to resort to buying pretty much everything second hand/refurbished in order to make that 20k go as far as possible.

 

It's not enough though (and never has been) as we have 10 year old promethean boards, 4 year old Ipad2s and various other things that are all gonna need replacing, and no budget for it. I've upgraded every PC I can with SSD drives to elongate their usefulness. Over the next 3 years we shouldn't need to buy any PCs so can redirect the funding elsewhere.

 

If I were you I would try and get 30-40k/year out of them for your size of school. If you can get 50k then you can make some real progress. I've always found a concise plan demonstrating where every pound will be spent over the three year period REALLY helps in securing funding.

 

Yeah, I do something similar but with a 5 year plan. Every year to the penny the budget is spoken for. We to have upgraded some of our 760's will extra RAM and SDD's over time.

[CyBeRkId2002]

We are a secondary school, around 1200 students on role, couple of physical building on site. I believe our budget (excluding licences) is south of £25k (we have a few different pots and can't remember exact figures off the top of my head). We cope absolutely fine, have managed to implement the changes we need and have a dedicated projects budget (around £10k of that £25k-ish figure), separated from eat maintenance, to move the school forward.

 

Big cost savings for us in the past have been:

 

* Cutting down on laptops across the college where possible (not always feasible). In our experience, depending on how well they are managed, desktops seem to have a functional life of double a laptop.

* Papercut rules and ensuring staff are following college printing policies (duplication goes via reprographics on cheaper and more efficient machines etc)

* Going down the route of desktops in every classroom for teachers. No laptops. No iPads. We do provide a remote access solution for staff and when surveyed almost all staff had a device at home capable of connecting to this. I am not a fan of duplication wherever necessary and despite initial push-back from some of the existing staff (this was around 8 years ago now), it is never even questioned any more.

 

If you want further info or a chat just let me know.

[Mark182]

We are a secondary school, around 1200 students on role, couple of physical building on site. I believe our budget (excluding licences) is south of £25k (we have a few different pots and can't remember exact figures off the top of my head). We cope absolutely fine, have managed to implement the changes we need and have a dedicated projects budget (around £10k of that £25k-ish figure), separated from eat maintenance, to move the school forward.

 

Big cost savings for us in the past have been:

 

* Cutting down on laptops across the college where possible (not always feasible). In our experience, depending on how well they are managed, desktops seem to have a functional life of double a laptop.

* Papercut rules and ensuring staff are following college printing policies (duplication goes via reprographics on cheaper and more efficient machines etc)

* Going down the route of desktops in every classroom for teachers. No laptops. No iPads. We do provide a remote access solution for staff and when surveyed almost all staff had a device at home capable of connecting to this. I am not a fan of duplication wherever necessary and despite initial push-back from some of the existing staff (this was around 8 years ago now), it is never even questioned any more.

 

If you want further info or a chat just let me know.

 

Thanks for the info!

[mjk]

Our biggest cost savings so far have been:

 

Replace promethean boards with cheaper Samsung or BENQ interactive LED TV's

Replace MSOffice with Google Apps for education (spend the savings on EES on a dual leased line)

Stop buying expensive MSOffice desktops and using chromeboxes or chromebooks.

Everything must be saved to cloud, stops the ever increasing requirement for server storage

Fewer, centralised printers. No more desk printers, MFD's only

Introduce a BYOD scheme and have parents contribute to the cost of you computers - no more IT suites except for specialist ones.

 

We've done all of that and we are still spending around £60-70 per pupil (the average according to the DfE is £80pp in the local area - sorry I can't remember where to look that up!).

Unfortunately you don't really have the budget to do much more than firefight.

[Mark182]

Our biggest cost savings so far have been:

 

Replace promethean boards with cheaper Samsung or BENQ interactive LED TV's

Replace MSOffice with Google Apps for education (spend the savings on EES on a dual leased line)

Stop buying expensive MSOffice desktops and using chromeboxes or chromebooks.

Everything must be saved to cloud, stops the ever increasing requirement for server storage

Fewer, centralised printers. No more desk printers, MFD's only

Introduce a BYOD scheme and have parents contribute to the cost of you computers - no more IT suites except for specialist ones.

 

We've done all of that and we are still spending around £60-70 per pupil (the average according to the DfE is £80pp in the local area - sorry I can't remember where to look that up!).

Unfortunately you don't really have the budget to do much more than firefight.

 

 

Thanks. Looking to get the Promethean boards out. We've invested a lot of time and some money into office 365. We are partly the way though saving to the cloud, will be a bigger push when windows 10 is deployed. BYOD isn't something that would work here. We have 463 eligible for PP.