Lew Trenchard School is a small primary school, with a roll of just 50 pupils, set in beautiful Devon with views across Dartmoor. Built with local stone in 1842, from the outside it looks like something from a bygone age, but once through the doors that image is quickly dispelled. The school is far from stuck in the past, and is constantly looking forward to the future—which is why they recently invested in state of the art technology to replace their old PCs.

Much of the curriculum depends on support through ICT, and Ofsted has highlighted the need to provide children with access to ICT in schools for extracurricular use; making good computer provision an absolute necessity in every school. At Lew Trenchard School the old computer suite was coming to the end of its life, and the school needed to both upgrade and expand it. Finding the budget to replace IT is difficult for every education provider; in a small school it’s even harder, but somehow a solution needed to be found.
Lew Trenchard is lucky to have KS2 teacher Jon Berry on board. As Jon had previously worked in the IT industry, he knew of such a solution. Jon said, “I was already familiar with the benefits of ‘thin client’ technology over traditional PCs. PCs were the only real option when ICT suites were first put into schools, but now ‘thin client’ or ‘virtual desktops’ are definitely the way forward for modern schools. They provide all the processing capacity that is needed, but cost so much less to buy and run, take up less space, use less energy and are easier to maintain.”

More ICT throughout the school:
and for a fraction of the cost of traditional PCs
Jon said, “ ‘Thin-client’ technology cost considerably less than simply replacing our old PCs would have done. The money we saved has meant that instead of just replacing our suite of 15 worn out PCs, we have increased that suite by 5 more workstations, and added 4 workstations in two other classrooms. This system is great: we’ve used both LAN based (L300) and direct-connect (X550) solutions, to give us everything we need. And we have future proofed our IT too.”

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