Shipston High School — A Specialist Technology College

Shipston High School is probably one of the few schools where the adjective ‘unique’ can truly be used. A high school with less than 400 pupils on the roll, set in the heart of rural South Warwickshire, you could be forgiven for expecting their IT provision to be somewhat dated. But you would be wrong. The school is justifiably proud to state in its prospectus that ‘as a result of our Specialist Technology College status, our school is now one of the best resourced and maintained schools in Warwickshire’. They have invested over £3 million in Science and Technology provision for the school in recent years.

This dedication to ensuring the best support for their pupils comes at a price; and replacing worn out, or out of date specification PCs, is a budget-buster. Or at least, it was, until Peter Reichers, IT Technician, saw the Desktop Virtualisation system demonstrated at an Eco day. Peter says, “We were so impressed with the system; it seemed robust enough to cope with the demands of a classroom, and yet would cost so much less to buy and run. We pretty much decided there and then that it was the way forward for Shipston.” Having spoken to a college in Leicester who had installed the system already, they decided to go ahead.

Replacing out of date and worn out ICT—the same level of ICT, but at a greatly reduced cost

“We are proud of our Technology College status”, says Peter Reichers, IT Technician, “but,” he goes on to say, “in order to provide the best IT for our students, the hardware needs to be kept up to date and renewed regularly,” adding, “If you estimate £500 per PC, you’re looking at a renewal cost of circa £13,000 every 3 years if you go down the conventional route. By using Desktop Virtualisation, if we want to upgrade, we only need to upgrade the two hosts, and replacing the access devices is considerably cheaper than a PC. To replace the whole suite shouldn’t cost more than £2 - 3 k. That’s a massive saving.”

Peter adds, “Because the access devices are so simple, they don’t need upgrading in the same way, and we envisage they will last twice as long as a PC. So, over a 10 year period, we will need to refresh twice— a total cost of c£4 –6k, as opposed to over 3 times with the PCs at a total cost of c£43k - saving in the region of £39,000 just on capital costs.”

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