DSapseid

We have a separate canteen block with full kitchen for the catering team. We have a 12mx18m school hall and a 10mx15m library made of 6 & 5 units to create one big space. We were lucky that our sports hall was a completely separate building across a car park on our site so that survived the fire, it also had a reception desk in as the original build had it being used in evenings for community lettings but that desk was never used. This building has access to the road so that is now our new temporary reception. Ill get some pictures of the canteen, library and hall.

When i had to put in all new phone lines after the school fire the quickest way to get all the phone lines back working again was to get a single BT line put in and then BT infinity broadband installed and all the SIP trunks run over that. Its been in for 5 months now and its been great, had no issues at all.

The amount these are costing to rent they will be gone rather quickly once they are no longer in use!! The old cabin that we had as part of the old school that survived the fire is being pulled down as part of the rebuild thank god!

Were currently working on a satelitte broadband piggy backing off the static caravan site that backs onto our field where we are based now so we have some broadband, it should be 45mb but its slow to load pages, once your on its fine but its a bit sluggish. Servers backing up into the cloud was the first thing i got working!

Hi Everyone, Sorry for not updating for a while! We are now pretty much back to normal, just a few things left outstanding to complete as a result of the fire. We moved into the 'Porta Cabin village' during October half term and it was a long week!! 2 new racks built and filled with new servers & switches. 150+new i5 desktops and 22" screens 25 SMART Interactive TV Panels with sound bars Ruckus Wifi LG Phone System Lilin CCTV Have all been installed and working nicely. At the end of last week we have now got the first draft of the plans for the rebuild and it does look really nice and im looking forward to being involved in the build. The only major thing that is still an issue is the internet. In the fact that BT/Virgin have still yet to re-install the leased line - nearly 5 months after ordering!! It should hopefully be in by the end of January! As part of the new build they are replacing our previous 750 capacity school with a 450 capacity secondary and a junior school 240 capacity on the same site. We are currently just under 400 students so we will still have scope for extra students. We are also getting a conference hall/theater as part of the build which will be able to used by the community as well. Attached are a few pictures of the 'boulevard' of portacabins and also a picture of what the front of the new school is going to look like. Looking forward to BETT this year and next to get ideas for the new build!

Update! New servers are in place and have been for a few weeks, new laptops for all staff, new wifi network, new voip phone system. Still waiting on a radio broadband solution going live as a temporary solution and awaiting on Virgin/BT to re run the leased line in. We are currently in 12 temporary portacabins for students and the first of our permanent portacabins arrived on tuesday! They look more like classrooms than portacabins. I will post some pictures when they are done. I have also put in 2 webcams for timelapse over the next 18/24 months to watch the demo/rebuild!

We are very small staff and only 50-60 of us, we all get on well and i would class most of them as friends as well as colleagues. This will undoubtedly bring us all closer together to get the job done and ensure that the students education doesn't suffer as result of this accident. The offers of help from staff both past and present with of copies of lesson plans and resources from their new schools and help in clearing the rubble away etc. has been unbelievable. The community has also been amazing and one of the parents has raised about £400 on just giving for the school, this will purchase a set of text books for a subject. The students have also been doing bake sales in their front gardens to raise money for the school as they want to try and help anyway they can.

Thanks alot for the words of support. Ive been working some really long days since sunday and my phone has been almost glued to my ear this week, good thing i get unlimited calls! I was sending emails and writing a mail merge to staff with there new office365 login details at 11pm last night and was on site at 8.30 this morning for a meeting! Im rather looking forward to the weekend and a few well deserved cold beers! I wouldnt wish this situation on anyone but im trying to make the best out of a bad situation. I turned up yesterday at the local school where we doing gcse results from this week with bacon sandwiches for everyone that was there doing exam stuff since 7am.

We are getting portacabins in the next few weeks, temporary arrangements have been made for the students to be taught in local venues in the village to keep the community working together. The portacabins we are getting are actually nicer than the school! See here for the update I believe the LA, DFE and trust are all working together to ensure the students learning is disrupted as little as possible. I then have the task of getting everything networked and phones and broadband put back in. Already had a site meeting with BT to discuss running new cables to feed the school.

Im using redstor for my cloud backup. My MAT have a partnership with them and i really like the software and would recommend them to anyone. The guys there are really helpful as well. Peace of mind for me was knowing that 5 hours before the fire i had all 5 servers fully backed up.

Hi Everyone. Wow what a 48 hours it has been!! The support from everyone on here, suppliers and on twitter has been immense. Thank you all for the offers of help and kit, i am in discussions with the trust about the plans moving forward for the next few weeks. I went to site this morning for the first time and 2 days later it was still smoldering!! I have attached 5 pics that i took when i was down there, the red box that i have drawn on is the remains of my server rack! Thanks again for all the messages of support. Ill try and keep this updated as best as i can but my phone is getting a hammering at the minute! Dan

Thanks everyone for your messages of support. I do have cloud backup of both file servers, exchange, sims and main dc. The head was happy when I told him!! I haven't been to site yet, was told not to bother. Server room and all onsite backups are gone but will just need a new server to restore backups to but that's a few days away yet. We have a primary school that is part of the MAT less than a mile away so GCSE results are being given out from there on Thursday. We also have a separate sports hall that is untouched as far as I know so I can hopefully set up a new temporary server rack there. Just need to get bt to run new broadband into it. It has its own separate power supply which is good as well. I will keep this thread updated with what happens!!

I did but i did t want it like this!! This is my school, server room will be one melted mess as was in middle of the lower block that is burnt out. Think my case for pushing for cloud backup 2 years ago is now justified!

I believe ours are 1/4 of a page of a4 as we put other info on the cards as well like, if they are entitled to 25% extra time, alternate venue, reader, rest breaks, word processor etc.

I was talking to our exams officer yesterday who had just got back from an exams officer conference and she was saying that how do external invigilators know that the right student is sat at the right desk doing the right exam. We get round it currently by having a member of slt in the exam hall at the start of every exam. We currently print exam place cards for every student and we are going to be putting the students photos from SIMS onto these place cards for next year.

Ive been asked to put in on the projector in the main hall after school so the kids (and staff) can watch the second half before going home. Luckily i have a freeview box connected to the projector in the hall but fully expecting the internet to get hit at 2.00!

Have you got any print credit software? I have papercut and you can get that to watermark it with username, might me able to get it to pull through department info as it has department fields in papercut?

You can download the latest version of the NovaSateliteSetup from the capita website. I had to do it before half term so our deputy head could write the timetable.

i have a handful of old laptops running xp and use wordpad for exams. They have no access to the network and work is printed via memory stick.

Ive got a big 15000va APC UPS that is connected by one those big blue power connectors. It powers my 8 servers, mac mini server, SAN, HP5412 core switch, router and 2 nvrs for cctv. The screen on the front says it will hold power for about 30mins at the minute. The ups powers 4 pdu bars and all the servers/switches have the power split across 2+ pdu bars (2 server racks side by side, one servers, one communications, 2 pdu bars in each). Ok it was £5-6k but we were having lots of power problems at the time and the business manager was happy to invest as part of a complete new server room install (new racks, switches, servers, san). Also just take delivery of 8 apc ups for the cabinets to power the switches as we are having lots of power work done over the summer.

Had to clear out a cupboard in one of the IT suites a few weeks ago and found these.

Report attached, if you have any questions about it then let me know. Attendance 15-16.zip

You can view a list of a students with different marks between sessions/lesson in Reports->Lesson Monitor->Selected Student Reports-> Compare Marks by column report. I dont know if you could automate this using the command exporter and then interrogate it from there. Ive never used the command exporter (think its called that anyway!)

PM me your email and i will email you over the SIMS report for you to import

Ive created a report in SIMS that outputs the following into excel. As well as what you can see in the screen shot it also does, LAC, PP, Non PP, Ethnicity, Persistent Absence, Persistent Absent inc & exc PP. Its give to SLT every friday and they like how they can see the difference between groups. I found trying to get PP (and other groups) attendance out of sims to be a bit of pain so i just did my own.