Being able to deal quickly with incidents within schools, such as disruptive behaviour or vandalism, is extremely important to create the right learning environment for young people. Having the right measures in place to deal with external risks is important too.
With stretched resources, investing in surveillance systems can help schools to reduce staff time spent on dealing with security and safeguarding issues. Being prepared to keep investing in camera and video management systems means schools can deal with incidents, and review footage, more quickly.
Madeley Academy, located near Telford, Shropshire, needed a complete upgrade of their CCTV system five years ago as they only had analogue cameras that had stopped being used because it was hard to operate and many were located in the wrong places.
Working with the school, our managing director, Aaron Kernaghan, was able to design a system using the latest Avigilon dome and bullet cameras from Motorola Solutions. However, he was also able to retain some analogue cameras and link them on to the Avigilon Unity video platform using encoders. This approach meant the school was then able to replace these cameras over time spreading their costs.
To install the latest IP cameras meant the team providing data cabling across the school which Steve Barnes, the Network Manager, was very impressed with: “Dave (Harris) was great and got cables to routes that I never thought he would get to.”
The school was particularly pleased that we were able to rearrange the camera layout so that the stairwell going to the dining room was now covered by the surveillance system. This was an area the school had always wanted to be able to view as they had had been quite a lot of pushing and shoving by pupils potentially causing accidents.
However, now they are able to keep the pupils more under control, and if they are misbehaving, individuals can be identified easily using the video management system. Staff time has been reduced investigating incidents and money has been saved as vandalism within school has reduced.
Steve said, “The CCTV system is so organised now we know what each camera is covering and the cameras are named. We now actively use the system as it so quick and easy to retrieve images and footage and rectify problems.”
Since the installation we have continued to support the school as it replaced the old cameras and storage appliances. However, since then there has been a revolution in surveillance with the growth of cloud computing.
Similar to the move to IP cameras, the switch to the cloud can be done in stages with the use of cloud connectors. This means schools wanting to monitor incidents quickly can retain existing IP cameras when they start using the cloud-connected software.
The advantages for schools are in reduced time and costs as network video recorders are no longer required and IT teams no longer need to be involved in software or security upgrades. All of the upgrades and security improvements are delivered directly via the cloud.
Additionally, if schools are developing their surveillance system from scratch, they can start small and scale up over time without spending more on additional storage. These cloud-based systems are totally flexible and scalable.
For school senior management, safeguarding and facilities teams there is also the peace of mind that cloud-connected surveillance camera systems can be managed and viewed remotely as long as you have internet access. That means notifications of unexpected intruders and vehicles out of school hours can be sent to mobile devices and incidents can be dealt with in real time if necessary.
Ecl-ips has been working with primary and secondary schools in the independent and state sector for over 10 years, providing the latest surveillance camera technology. We have always been mindful of potentially tight budgets and we can work with schools to deliver capital expenditure or operating expenditure solutions.
We offer the Avigilon Alta Video system, which has the added benefit that it can be integrated with its cloud-based access control platform. If your school would benefit from improving its surveillance, access control and monitoring, please get in touch.