Behaviour is good and the staff feel well supported. We have a well developed pastoral system where behaviour is directly inked to academic achievement and positive mentoring is effective.

Edensor became a Technology College in September 2004. Design and Technology was a very successful subject with results approaching national averages.  We are approaching re designation following a satisfactory OfSTED in October 2006 although our GCSE results, whilst improving, will not allow a second specialism application at this stage.

Edensor is proactive in seeking additional funding through bid writing and corporate sponsorship and have successfully raised over £400,000 in the last 12 months alone. We do recognise that our socio - economic situation lends itself to enhanced funding and ticks an awful lot of the criteria boxes on most bidding forms but we are also quick to identify areas that would be attractive to corporate sponsorship and therefore profitable for the school.

Leadership Vision

The Senior Leadership Team wanted the enhanced funding from Technology College Status to permeate all subject areas and chose to enhance the ICT provision to benefit all subjects, staff and students.

Well before Technology College status was achieved we had a vision relating to Interactive whiteboards and a laptop for every teacher. This was a time when we still had a significant number of chalk boards in the school and the interactive whiteboard was a very new device.

When Technology College status was achieved we had already installed a large number of interactive whiteboards and many of our staff had laptops. Specialist status allowed us to complete this element and to expand the vision further to include a laptop for every student. Obviously we were idealists in a naive world, but in 2004 the computer seemed to be the answer to many educational problems and our own experiences in the classroom had seen student interaction and motivation increase significantly with staff reporting improvements in behaviour and participation. It seemed that the opportunity to interact through ICT was indeed a great motivator and by providing all students with a laptop we could convert the most unruly and demotivated child into the model student.

By 2005/6 the vision had evolved, laptop trials had proved ineffective with students leaving the valuable resource at home where it was used most. The move toward thin client technology and Citrix connectivity provided new opportunities, a low cost but more effective solution to the original vision of a laptop for every student. The new vision related to connectivity and communication. Every student should have the ability to connect to the school network from home, be able to access the applications and resources and contribute and respond where appropriate.

Supporting infrastructure

ICT has always been an area of uncertainty, one minute it works and the next it doesn't, without any detectable change in circumstances. In the early days any unpredictability was sufficient to deter all but the most enthusiastic until the supporting infrastructure was put into place. We are all quite happy to manoeuvre the mouse or tap on the keyboard but when things go wrong very few of us are prepared to roll up our sleeves and dive in amongst the diodes!

Our teaching staff have gained confidence not because of the hardware or software but because of the technical support and ICT infrastructure.

We have five full time technicians including two senior development technicians who have overall responsibility for everything but have the final say over procurement, priorities and development paths. We have one junior technician who manages the day to day priorities, one web developer / programmer who works with the website and vle, and a home installation technician who works with the thin client installations into student homes and any issues relating to them.

We also have a technician who is on a six month placement from our local university, this a constant source of fresh blood as inevitably, experience leads to continued employability on industry standard salaries which is considerably more than we could pay them.

All of our technicians are graduates and we foster management skills as well as technical skills. Our CPD programme extends to them although this is costly, but their enhanced knowledge base only serves to extend our development at school level. The senior technicians work with a senior member of staff who acts as their interface for development planning, enhanced funding or anything that may need a kind word from the senior leadership team!

We have a room dedicated to technicians (a confused mass of wires, coffee cups, broken swivel chairs and sweet papers) where communication between technicians consists of email and msn even though they are sitting in the same room!  We also have a room dedicated to servers, the server room is the only room in the school to be air conditioned, it even has two air conditioning units, with one used as a standby if the other fails! I have given up trying to pretend that I understand servers anymore, we are now in the realms of racks, blades, PSU, NAS etc. The only comfort that I can take is that increased expenditure seems to equate to increased reliability!

School Resources

Edensor Technology College has in excess of 450 computers dedicated for student access, this does not include staff laptops of which there are just over 100. When we reach 500 we will have achieved a computer to pupil ratio of 1:2 in school, a target that we are rapidly moving towards and one that we do not see the need to exceed. Every member of staff has a laptop and all rooms are equipped with an interactive whiteboard and projector.

Emphasis has been placed upon ease of access and whilst we retain five ICT rooms dedicated to the delivery of the ICT curriculum, almost all remaining computers are wireless laptops held in trolleys of 15 at least one to each department area. The whole school is wireless providing internet and network access. Media studies and Design & Technology are equipped with higher specification laptops to cope with the more memory intensive applications as are the staff who teach in these areas. We are now in the position where every subject can have ICT when and where they want it.

A significant number of the school computers are thin client machines, this could either be a dedicated thin client terminal specifically manufactured for this purpose or existing machines that have been set up to access the network as a thin client. We can effectively take machines that we would normally throw away and give them a new lease of life by setting them up as thin clients without any impact upon performance or capability. Having the Citrix infrastructure with thin client terminals has allowed us much more flexibility in the configuration of ICT across the school as well as making a significant cost saving on our recurring three year lease arrangement that we operated previously.

Staff Approach

Over the last five years the staff at Edensor have experienced massive developments in ICT provision which in turn has placed increased demands on their ability to adapt their teaching styles and their own personal capability.

Not all of our staff have found the transition easy but early provision of laptops and interactive whiteboards allowed exploration and experimentation. Staff in some departments voluntarily extended department meetings to discuss interactive whiteboard resources and shared good practice. Every department has a member of staff representing them on the ICT Across the Curriculum (ICTAC) meeting where most developments and requests for CPD stem from.

I feel that our most important achievement has been our approach to adopting new technologies. In an attempt to encourage staff to use email we distributed the weekly meeting minutes only via email and our headteacher occasionally offered the opportunity to bid for extra departmental funding through email open only to those who read it. Even when we introduced electronic registration we ran it for a year with paper copies alongside to allow those less confident to attend drop in sessions after school reducing the immediate pressure to comply.

Departments are now at the stage where curriculum resources are created digitally and shared amongst other department staff, reducing workload and encouraging further development. The electronic registration system has been developed by our pastoral team to include rewards and sanctions allowing pastoral staff to have an overview at the touch of a button linking behaviour to academic achievement.

As a senior leader I am proud to be associated with Edensor and the way in which both teaching and support staff have actively embraced developments in ICT in a way that I have not seen in any other school. They are justifiably impressed with the impact that ICT has had on their teaching and upon student attitude and behaviour.

Major Achievements

Over the last year Edensor Technology College has expanded its provision to include thin client terminals into student homes. The Citrix infrastructure allows remote access to the school network and is licensed by the number of concurrent logins rather than the number of terminals. This allows the licences used during the school day to be used equally effectively out of school hours by students and families without incurring additional cost.

The major benefits include:

·       Remote Application Delivery - Students logging in from home can use all of the software currently installed on the school network without having it installed locally. This removes the problems of incompatibility between different versions of software and the need for parents to purchase expensive software applications.

·       Flexible Access - Students and families that already have a computer and broadband internet access at home can  connect to Citrix via the school website enabling equal access for all students.

·       File Transfer - Students can access their individual user areas retrieving and saving files and removing the need to email, print or save to external devices.

·       Internet Security - Parents can allow their children to explore the internet, confident in the knowledge that it is accessed through the school network and as such is secure and filtered just as it is in school.

·       Theft / Damage - The tin client terminals have no moving parts other than the on/off button. They have no operating system, no hard drive and are completely useless unless connected remotely to the school Citrix network. If stolen they have no resale value. In areas of high social depravation this has to be a consideration.

·       Hardware Life Expectancy - As the terminals have no moving parts we anticipate that they will last at least the five years that they are in the student homes making them a very cost effective solution to bridging the digital divide.

Edensor is the first school in the country to provide thin client computers at home on this scale with the capacity to sustain functionality and commitment.

I started my time at Edensor as a computer enthusiast, one who had started when computing required you to learn programming in basic. I had built my own computer and it worked! Five years later and I have had the privilege of recruiting and working with a specialist team of technicians who have moved the network forward to such an extent that I can no longer keep up. I have ceased to be a nerd, I am now just another user!

I have also been blessed by having a headteacher and fellow leadership team who have been supportive from the start, willing to take chances and to trust the technical team. Without this support and continued funding we would not have achieved much beyond the basics.

Finally I have to thank the staff, the advocates, the complaints and the reluctants, all of whom fall into the category of damn hard workers and who see the computer as a tool used for the benefit of the education of our pupils.