St Peter’s Primary School in Budleigh Salterton, Devon, led by Head Teacher Steve Hitchcock, has created a unique curriculum to maximise the learning experiences of their pupils. Their motto is: ‘Growing together in mind, body and spirit’. They are working together to achieve academic, sporting, spiritual and musical excellence, whilst enabling pupils to become fantastic citizens for the future.
With increasing demand on budgets any ability to save costs is essential for every school. With ICT becoming increasingly recognised as an important facilitator to learning, cutting costs on technology seems unfathomable.
St Peter’s previously benefited from a dedicated fibre connection, providing a 10Mb symmetrical service. Yet, at nearly £6000 a year cost savings had to be made. With the need to tighten budgets, St Peter’s got in touch with SWGfL. As well as cost saving, St Peter’s needed to ensure a reliable, safe and affordable connection.
SWGfL were able to offer the school a Superfast Broadband solution called EOSFBB (Ethernet Over Superfast Broadband) offering speeds of up to 80MB downstream and up to 20MB upstream. The new solution delivers 8x more bandwidth at less than half the cost of the previous solution, whilst safety and security are included as standard.
I couldn’t believe I was getting more bandwidth for less cost – I had to check several times there wasn’t a catch! There wasn’t!
Steve Hitchcock, Head Teacher
The school are now regularly using up to 7 times more bandwidth for a fraction of the price.
Most of the work we do is in the cloud. Without this type of connectivity the school would grind to a halt! We’ve found it fast, reliable and fantastic value
Steve Hitchcock, Head Teacher
So what has this meant for St Peter’s primary? Moving away from a cost prohibitive service to superfast broadband has provided the school with a faster, more reliable and affordable connection. In the classroom teachers have noticed a faster connection, especially when teaching interactive sessions.
Continuing their work with SWGfL, St Peter’s Primary is now looking forward to its first Barefoot workshop. Barefoot workshops are designed to provide primary educators with the confidence, knowledge, skills and resources to teach computer science.
