Creative and compelling
innovation as a long term investment
Solutions
The Hadley Learning Community
21st century learning for Telford
Brief:
This Hadley pathfinder project for Telford & Wrekin Council was born out of their current DfES-funded NGfL project, the first e-learning project of its kind in Europe in 2000. The NGfL project provided unrivalled school networking, linking all primary and secondary schools and a total of 24,000 students.
A natural evolution from this advanced e-learning activity was to extend the provision to explore how to tackle the Every Child Matters agenda. The planning for this development began in 2005 to produce outcomes that could influence future developments in the region, and perhaps the rest of the UK.
Acutely aware of the speed of development needed for all aspects of learning in the community, enabling the provision of learning resources outside of school hours, allowing schools to be used by adult learners, and other facilities being shared by their communities, Telford & Wrekin decided to create the ultimate starting point for 21st century learning.
Solution:
Making learning inclusive to all the community is a future responsibility for Local Authorities that Telford takes seriously, hence their pioneering venture into this area. In 2006 Telford & Wrekin Council decided to do this by combining four existing schools and other community services into a learning resource centre that would provide both a virtual and physical environment for anytime learning and life-skills development.
As a trusted partner to Telford & Wrekin since 2000, having developed a strategy to consolidate their corporate network with relative public sectors organisations, Synetrix were already in support of the evolution of the Telford network that would lead to the Hadley Learning Community.
Hadley School is one of the first PFI based academies in the UK. The project involved the build of a totally new site that will offer multiple services to the community including a 420-place primary school, 1200-place secondary school, relocated Bridge special school, library, crèche, nursery and childcare support, health services for young children, a learning resource centre, 150-seat theatre, café, swimming pool, fitness gym and sports pitches.
Synetrix delivered a total package of services into the new school campus. In the first instance this consists of a wired and wireless infrastructure that delivers multi service connectivity throughout the campus which delivers unified voice, data, and video services to Hadley Learning Community. These form the foundations for all services offered as part of this new school.
Synetrix have worked closely with the build project leader, Interserve, Telford’s PFI contractor, to ensure that IT considerations are not only able to address the current needs but are scaled for future growth and expansion.
The campus will be ready for the intake of new pupils in January 2007.
