St Agnes C of E Primary School

The Brief
Approaching the building of a new school on the original site of a Victorian school was always going to be a challenging brief for any builder. The answer, demolish the school and build Britain’s first self assembly “flatpack” school. The new school incorporates 9 classrooms, a 90 place nursery and an outdoor play area on the roof.

Bernard Cole, framework one manager with Manchester City Council, admits it was a challenging brief,

“What we wanted was something that could almost land here from outer space and be ready to use.”

St Agnes is indeed a state of the art school, and Digitech’s challenge was to provide a state of the art ICT and AV infrastructure with heavy emphasis on sustainability and energy efficiency.

Our Solution
ICT and AV services within the original school were like the old Victorian building, in a poor state with little or no equipment. Working with the school and the Framework planning team, Digitech designed and built an ICT and AV layout for each individual classroom area. 

All classrooms feature Smart™ height adjustable 660i interactive whiteboards that work seamlessly with the Soundfield audio system. Within the Nursery and Early Years Areas, concerns were raised about utilising projectors within the classrooms so we installed LCD screens with interactive overlays. 

All new desktop computers and laptops were supplied via Hewlett Packard and comply with the latest Energy Star® 5.0 specifications. All machines are 85% energy efficient and screen and desktop sleep times are 15 minutes.

Heavy emphasis was placed on a fully functioning Ruckus™ wireless network system. The use of a Ruckus network allowed us to reduce the number of required hard-wired outlets and thus the amount of pvc cabling within the school and gave the school the flexibility to utilise laptops in the large outdoor rooftop playground.

• Location: Longsight, Manchester
• Sector: Education
• Project Value: £6.2 million
• Scope of Works: Installation of AV and ICT Networks