Springfields School

When Wendy Hall, ICT Coordinator for Springfields School, asked Surftec to install and configure their 21 Thin Clients and 15 PCs little did she know that she had stumbled across a goldmine of resources. With a group of children even more prone to create problems with computers, Surftec installed a special network that operated safely under the ravages of the boarding school life.

But with Surftec Wendy got a far better service than she expected, during discussions with Surftec’s Neil Farnham-Smith, he identified a problem in the school that he explained could be assisted with a custom-written addition to the NetManager system that he was installing to manage their administrative and teaching needs.

The Springfields School runs a behaviour management system based on points, after each lesson the children are awarded a certain number of points, for example 32 for completing the task set, 31 for working for the whole lesson down to negatives for interrupting staff and so on. In a week a child could earn anything from -2000 up to +4000 points.

The system was working but being manually-based updating was slow and it was difficult for children to monitor their own progress. Neil explained how the school’s behaviour management procedures could be added seamlessly to the NetManager software and transferred to the network, it was agreed the software would be written.

The custom software itself was developed by Surftec’s partner Precedence Technologies to integrate with their NetManager and the end result has revolutionised behaviour management at the school. Now the central database is updated for each child after every lesson by the teacher in the classroom, the children are able to access their current status at any time. In both cases the only software you need to access and update the information is a standard web browser anywhere on the network.

Wendy says: “The new system has really worked. It has made the children much more aware of where they are and their level of behaviour, it can really help to change behaviour. Not only can we see the overall scores but we can also see the predominant type of behaviour occurring in the school and this helps in planning strategies to improve the situation.”