Helping Glasgow’s special needs schools reach out to every child

Glasgow City Council provides a high quality learning experience to pupils attending over 300 teaching establishments - ranging from small Pre-5 establishments through to large Comprehensive Secondary schools. Within this structure the Council makes provision for all young people of varying abilities. Its aim is to maximise the learning potential of children in Glasgow, prepare them effectively for the world of work and ensure that time spent at any of its schools is a positive and enjoyable experience. It does this through ‘Education Services’, a department dedicated to delivering the highest quality teaching standards, encouraging lifelong learning and raising the achievement and attainment levels of all young learners.

Meeting the learning needs of every child

Glasgow’s Education Services is responsible for meeting the learning needs of all its young people, whilst promoting a policy of inclusion for every student - whatever their ability or educational needs. Above all, the department’s overriding aim is to make learning relevant, fun, exciting and accessible to everyone. To achieve this it provides both mainstream schools and a variety of highly specialist schools, units and in-class support systems for children with learning or physical disabilities.

With such wide-ranging needs to cater for, Education Services aims to meet them all by delivering the curriculum through a number of tailored approaches. For children attending special education centres these include ‘support for learning’ and ‘individualised educational plans.’ But these can differ greatly from child to child, and place a high-level of dependency on teachers and classroom helpers to deliver intensely personalised learning.

As a result, classroom ICT resources (such as PCs, smart boards and digital projectors) play a significant role in addressing individual learning needs and styles by enabling teachers to select resources that help with specific difficulties. For example, a keyboard and screen might make writing easier for one child, while others may draw on a talking CD-ROM book to support and encourage their reading. Using ICT to facilitate learning in this way requires a robust and reliable technology infrastructure - one which won’t let the teachers or pupils down; is able to cope with the ever-changing demands placed upon it; and requires no on-site maintenance at the expense of valuable teaching time.

Using technology to best advantage

To facilitate ICT-assisted learning, and voice and data communications, Education Services had in place a number of leased ISDN lines. Whilst these lines were providing internet and data connectivity across 34 special needs sites, they weren’t able to support the department’s growing communications needs.

In particular, the organisation’s ISDN lines were unable to offer the scalable bandwidth necessary to meet local eGovernment objectives - which aim to improve services with the increased use of technology. For Glasgow City Council this has meant being able to offer teachers and pupils an unfailingly high-speed internet connection; easier and faster information sharing and storage between special needs sites and the wider school community; and the future capability to make media-rich and high-volume curricular content available online.

Archie Walker, Information Communications & Technology (ICT) Manager in Glasgow City Council’s Education Services department, explained, “The mainstream primary and secondary schools were already operating with a managed ICT service, and it was important for us to bring our special needs schools up to the same level. However, we needed a truly scalable solution to accommodate their needs - particularly in terms of supporting ICT-assisted learning programmes in such a specialised teaching environment.”

He continued, “We also needed the chosen solution to deliver true reliability, and have it managed on our behalf. We need our staff to be able to concentrate on using technology to help the pupils learn in the classroom, not be bogged down by technical issues. Furthermore, being able to easily communicate with our neighbouring schools would enhance the development of teaching methods and sharing of best practice - something that benefits teachers and pupils alike. So our aim was quite clear - we needed to replace our existing ISDN lines with a modern, managed, high-speed data service that could offer reliability, resilience and robustness.”

Delivering reliability, flexibility and scalability

To find the right supplier and solution, Glasgow City Council carried out a best value exercise across all the major telecommunications providers. Having compared each tender’s technical solution against value for money, ntl Business was awarded the contract to design and implement a bespoke network to fit the requirements of Glasgow’s special needs schools. Due to its reliability and deep understanding of public sector requirements - and a logical and flexible approach to the design brief - ntl was able to offer the education provider a cost costeffective, scalable and efficient solution that would provide a more productive learning and teaching environment.

Archie Walker said, “The combination of ntl’s experience in education, and their ability to devise such a fitting and cost-effective solution for our needs, was a winning formula. They planned a logical, joined-up community network that was innovative, well-thought through and gave us confidence that this was the right move.”

Connecting Glasgow’s special needs schools

The project, which took just four months from design to roll-out, combines ntl Ethernet VPN (Virtual Private Network) - a multi-site platform that uses switched Ethernet technology and extends the existing Local Area Network environment - with ntl Dedicated Internet Access and ntl Broadband Power. ntl Ethernet VPN provides IP connectivity for 27 of the 34 special needs

schools in the region, and offers access to high-speed bandwidth capability of up to 1Gigabyte. ntl is also maintaining the network and hardware that links each local site, and delivers a fully-managed service to ensure uninterrupted connectivity.

“The initial design concept ntl produced really helped with the actual implementation. We were extremely pleased with the smooth installation and were impressed with their engineering expertise, flexibility to accommodate our needs and rigorous project management. As a result, we now have the technology in place to deliver real-time collaboration between staff and pupils, and fast transmission of even the largest files,” added Archie Walker.

Making data instantly accessible – in any format

Although, the Council’s main internet connection could manage a considerable quota of content for download, onward distribution of any graphical and feature-rich content to its special needs schools was hampered by a 2Mb limitation - which affected the efficiency and speed at which data could be shared between sites.

To rectify this, ntl Ethernet VPN is now delivering enhanced network connectivity to 17 of Glasgow’s specialist schools at 10 Megabytes per second (Mb/s) - with the flexibility to scale up to 100Mb/s whenever required. It provides Ethernet connections between the special needs sites, allowing Local Area Networks (LANs) to be interconnected and facilitating limitless data sharing between them.

Archie Walker said, “The scalability the solution provides will be of great benefit to Education. And, to increase our bandwidth won’t require us to invest in new equipment. This functionality also enables us to plan for our future when more content will be made accessible online.”

He continued, “For instance, disseminating information to a special needs audience might be better achieved in a video or audio format rather than text-heavy documents. In the future, distant sites with this level of high speed connectivity will be able to transfer media-rich files of data, video or voice traffic quickly and easily.” The ntl solution also provides the scope to extend the same IP connectivity to more special needs schools or learning units in the future, by using the common switched Ethernet infrastructure, which enables flexible traffic engineering and low-cost standard charges for additional links.

Enabling IT to stand on its own two feet

For Glasgow City Council’s Education Services department, ntl Ethernet VPN connectivity is enabling users, including teachers and pupils, to experience enhanced network performance speed between locations. It is enabling people, information and learning tools to be quickly and easily accessible, wherever they are based. Furthermore, it is allowing greater communication and collaboration across the wider school community.

Archie Walker concluded, “Having a resilient system that delivers steadfast connectivity takes away any maintenance worries that might hinder our teaching performance. The ntl solution is enabling our teachers to have confidence that the communications technology they need is ready and waiting for them at the flick of a switch, and that it won’t let them down.”