Haberdashers’ Borough Academy implements Genetec Security Centre to deliver optimal care to staff and students
Haberdashers’ Borough Academy Flagship school safeguards students using Genetec VMS Case Study Haberdashers’ Borough Academy is a new secondary school built on the site of a former fire station in Central London. The school admitted its first learners in September 2019 and will ultimately grow to accommodate 1,150 students. As the ninth school to form part of the Haberdashers’ Academies Trust South, the school represents a flagship site for the wider organisation. Always prioritising the safety of students and staff, the organisation saw an opportunity to adopt a best-of-breed video security system to help safeguard the new school.
Moving away from basic surveillance technology
Upon taking ownership of the Borough Academy facilities, Haberdashers’ safeguarding leads quickly realised that the video management system (VMS) pre-installed by the developers was not up to scratch.
Just 15 cameras were installed across the entire premises, most of which focussed on entrances and exits. The VMS also couldn’t integrate with other physical security systems, creating data silos and slowing access to vital information.
With limited visibility of what was happening on the playground or in the corridors, it was difficult for designated safeguarding leads to respond to incidents and meet their duty of care to students and staff. The issue was raised to Edward Avenell, Director of IT, who immediately got to work on delivering a better alternative. “Our designated safeguarding leads are responsible for ensuring the welfare of everybody on the school premises. We owed it to them to give them access to the right tools to do their job,” said Edward.
After evaluating a range of enterprise VMSs, Edward chose Security Centre Omnicast, an open video management system, as the best fit for Borough Academy’s requirements. Genetec Security Center is a unified platform that combines the video surveillance, access control, automatic number plate recognition (ANPR), and other systems in one intuitive solution.
According to Edward, “It came recommended as another of Haberdashers’ sites was already using the Genetec security platform and receiving positive feedback from users. Security Centre could support our long-term strategy to move IT infrastructure to the cloud. Plus, there is the potential to expand our security deployment in a phased manner as our requirements evolve going forward.”
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