The Background
Messingham Primary School is a friendly school in the village of Messingham, 4 miles south of Scunthorpe in North Lincolnshire. With 260 pupils, the school plays an important role encouraging its children, staff, parents, governors and the wider community to value education and become life-long learners.
As a modern school, Messingham Primary recognises the importance of technology, choosing the IT provider – RM – to provide its broadband connectivity connection.
The Challenge
The world of technology moves fast, and when a new member of staff arrived at Messingham Primary, the school were faced with a number of choices on how best to install a new telephone line. Given their existing relationship with RM, it made sense to seek their advice.
“As our Broadband provider we were very happy with the service from RM, finding them very professional and efficient. We were having a few problems with our previous telephone provider and when RM suggested that they could replace our existing telephone line with a new one that ran as part our internet service, that seemed a good idea”.
Wendy Barrett, Business Manager
The service that RM recommended was their Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service which is the more modern way of making phone calls over internet lines as opposed to older copper phone lines. Put simply, this ensures better connectivity and call quality, as well as allowing multiple phone calls over the same line (as opposed to one per line), saving schools like Messingham Primary time and money, whilst allowing them to consolidate their school connectivity into one connection.
Now is a good time for schools to be looking at this, with BT announcing that they intend to switch off all copper phone lines from 2025.
The Response
As a busy school, it was important that the new service was installed swiftly, with minimum disruption to their existing telephony. Because RM only work in the Education Sector, they understand this better than most.
“Whilst it took a little while to get it up and running, once everything was sorted with our previous provider it went much more quickly and the install was very fast and efficient”.
Wendy Barrett, Business Manager
The Benefits
There are numerous benefits from using a VoIP solution – from the ability to have all calls going through a central reception, to being scalable and flexible as a school grows, keeping existing telephone numbers and including free handsets as part of the contract that are guaranteed to work with the new system.
“For us, the benefits were very simple – such as having a new cordless telephone that staff can take out of the office to use that is always in range”.
Wendy Barrett, Business Manager
Best of all is the simplicity of this new system. It is so easy to use, and so much more reliable than more traditional solutions.
“We have had no problems with it whatsoever. All the staff that use it have been very impressed. It makes the school feel much more modern, reflecting our ethos to embrace new technologies”.
Wendy Barrett, Business Manager
The lessons learnt to be passed on to other schools
- Just do it! In the words of Messingham Primary School, it has been so easy to change systems, that they don’t know why they hadn’t done it earlier.
- Ask for help from people who understand it. For Messingham Primary, they found some of the forms complicated to complete, but their contact at RM talked them through them all, and everything went smoothly.
“There are so many things that we do now that involve technology, that I think this is the way forward. VoIP was just the latest that we took in our stride, and we have never looked back”.
Wendy Barrett, Business Manager
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