Case Study: Southend High School for Boys

About Southend High School for Boys

Southend High School for Boys is a selective grammar school located in Southend-On-Sea, educating boys in years 7-11 and has a co-educational Sixth Form. With an outstanding Ofsted rating in every category, education is highly valued and talent is nurtured. As a grammar school, high expectations are central to their purpose and they achieve them through an extensive programme of support and guidance.

The site boasts acres of sports fields, walking distance of Prittlewell Station, and is right at the heart of Southend. They take pride in preserving their values and traditions from the past, and prepares pupils through a contemporary curriculum for the world of tomorrow.

“Contemporary traditions: one with future and with past”

The Challenge

Southend High School for Boys had an ageing telephone system and needed to migrate to a flexible VoIP Cloud Telephone System due to BT’s ISDN switch off. As part of the project the school needed to explore what new features and applications would benefit the school and provide staff, parents and pupils with an enhanced experience and efficiencies.

Southend High School for Boys wanted a cost effective, reliable and user friendly solution that gave them the ability to migrate to SIP allowing Unified Comms to work alongside their traditional telephone system features needs, futureproofing their schools telecoms and allowing the staff to be able to communicate seamlessly from home and in school better reflecting their modern learning environment.

The Solution

After various detailed discussions between Atlas Support and Southend High School for Boys the solution decided upon was a Wildix Cloud Telephone System. The school wanted to be able to use a blend of traditional and modern technologies and Wildix offers this. Wildix has been validated by the foremost experts in the technology market, Gartner. Gartner have placed Wildix in the magic quadrant for UCaaS, worldwide.

Atlas Support installed the basic telephony and unified communications licenses from Wildix providing up to 10 connected devices, video, document share and chat. In addition to this, the school are now able to use GB handsets and LED Bluetooth headsets which show user status.

The Results

Following the implementation of Atlas Support’s expert solutions. Southend High School for Boys have seen many major benefits:

Savings- The Wildix system provided a high end solution for a cost effective price.
Remote working capabilities- Staff members at Southend High School for boys can now stay connected no matter what their location is.
Future Proof- With technology built to be used now and in the future. Southend High School can be confident their solution will evolve as the school does, with no hidden expenses.
Usability- The system put in place is a simple to use, scalable solution built for those with high technology affinity and those who have limited knowledge.

More general benefits include:

Full High Availability (HA) deployment-Ensuring their system maintains high level operational performance 

Call recording

Unified Comms alongside traditional telephony solutions
Call management
Peer to peer conferencing
External conferencing
Voicemail transcription