About The Kingsway School
The Kingsway School is an 11-16 mixed comprehensive state secondary school in Stockport. A high achieving academy school with a “good” Ofsted rating, the school suddenly found itself needing to radically and rapidly change the way it communicated amongst staff and students due to the unexpected challenges of Covid-19.
Challenge
The school had a legacy telephony system that despite being upgraded to deliver IP capability and allow SIP, was still very restricted in terms of its functionality. We had built up a collaborative relationship with the school over the last 10 years, and strategic discussions had already taken place with the IT manager around replacing the system. When Covid-19 hit, we received information about a free meetings service, and the team proactively contacted the school’s IT team to offer them the solution.
Solution
A link was sent to the meetings app and after a brief discussion on how to use it, the school was quickly able to deploy it to the senior leadership team (SLT). The app not only enables the SLT team to communicate securely internally but also to teach remotely, providing an excellent alternative to Google Classroom. After a second demo to run through the meetings software, our teams also installed a softphone.
This effectively enabled a secondary phone system to run alongside the existing system with a view to migrating in the future. The initial plan was to deploy 5 softphones for the SLT team, but this was extended to 16 softphones because of the success of the solution.
Outcome
Rapid and secure connection with staff and vulnerable students – deployment within a week meant the school had a fully operational facility to be able to communicate with students.
- Ease of use – no training required as intuitive to use.
- Maintain staff privacy – enabled staff to contact vulnerable students and display a school number instead of a personal mobile number.
- Remote deployment – the cloud solution meant that no site visit to the school was required at any point, which was particularly relevant to the requirements with Covid-19 social distancing requirements.
- Flexibility – the solution can be configured around the exact needs of the school, adaptable for future use whenever needed.