The Background
The Colne Community School and College is a Secondary School and Sixth Form, located in Brightlingsea, Colchester, Essex. The school offers education for c.1,400 students, aged 11 to 19. They became an Academy in 2011, and became part of the Sigma Trust in January 2019.
The Challenge
The school migrated from their Local Authority broadband connection to RM in 2016, after frequent downtime and a perception of poor value for money forced them to look around.
“We selected RM’s connectivity services, on the basis of a faster connection with a backup line for a lower cost”
Julian Scotcher, IT Manager
The Benefits
As a result, RM provided the school’s vital broadband connectivity for over 3 years. During that time, the school have taken advantage of cost saving cloud facilities such as G Suite for their email hosting, data storage and classroom management.
“In the last 3 years with RM, we have not had a single broadband outage. This has been absolutely crucial, as a large proportion of our curriculum has become increasingly web-based over the past 5 years”
Julian Scotcher, IT Manager
The reliability of the connection enabled the school to proceed with their journey to cloud services. This was coupled with enterprise-level control procedures such as change control, which ensured they could rely on the connection without any uninformed surprises.
The message to other schools
Whilst The Colne is leaving RM, this is only because their MAT had already decided on an alternative Trust-wide broadband provider. They continue to advocate RM as a connectivity provider for any school looking for such a service.
“Schools are becoming more and more reliant on cloud services. The only way you can make this journey is with a broadband connection you can rely on. RM offer competitive prices and reliability for the backbone of a modern school”
Julian Scotcher, IT Manager
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