Cost effective curriculum delivery at Skegness Grammar

Background

In 2001, the school had an ageing Novell and Windows 98 curriculum network. This was clearly in need of an upgrade. The analysis of the options showed that installing a Microsoft Windows 2000 server and the associated office suite would have cost around £100,000 including the hardware upgrade to cope with the new Windows software. The decision to be made was how to move to a reliable and secure network without too much expenditure or change for the staff and students.

The school already had a small GNU/Linux network in its boarding house which proved popular and very stable. The decision was made initially to investigate, and eventually to install a free software system across the site.

All the school's 180 curriculum computers now run GNU/Linux. These run as thin clients using the Linux Terminal Server Project, which uses low power clients with most of the processing being done on fewer, more powerful, servers.

Strategy for whole school implementation

The school ICT Co-ordinator, Garry Saddington, produced a costing for a school Linux solution which came in at a 70% saving compared to the equivalent proprietary solutions. This discussion document was distributed to the Senior Management. He was given approval to test Linux in one classroom and designed a Linux Terminal Server Project solution. This had two servers, running SuSE and 34 thin clients. Including the chairs, the total cost was £6,000.

Garry then spread Linux to the other two ICT suites, at which point they needed a dedicated Linux network manager. Alistair Crust was appointed and took over the day to day running of the network, and has been responsible for serving the technology needs of the school community for the last three years. Since being appointed to manage the network, Alistair has overseen a migration to Ubuntu. Alistair said “I had heard of this new up-and-coming download called Ubuntu and tried it out at home first. I loved it immediately. Ubuntu is straight to the point. There are no features that shouldn't be there or are implemented just because they can be.”

The current configuration is:

• 4 servers for the 180 thin client desktops, running Ubuntu;
• extra servers are used for e-mail, electronic marking, MIS (ScholarPack), pupil database server, content management system, firewall, internet content filtering, proxy and DNS;
• all the school's management information requirements are undertaken by the web based MIS, ScholarPack, developed and written by Garry – this software is due to be released as free software later in 2008;
• a single Windows server providing applications through the open source remote desktop protocol rdesktop for a few areas to deliver software wanted by some staff.

“It grew through the need to teach ICT using something reliable,” remarks Garry; “I feel we have better curriculum facilities than any school running Windows – and with far more reliability. As part of our computing specialism we are doing a full network Linux install in one primary school and we are trialling ScholarPack in another.”

Curriculum applications

The school uses a wide range of free and open source applications – in fact all of the curriculum requirements are met through free software, including:

• OpenOffice.org offers the main office suite;
• Gimp and Inkscape for graphics work;
• Kdissert for mind mapping;
• Kjots for note taking and planning;
• Planner for Gantt charting;
• Knoda and Rekall for database front ends;
• Zope for A level project work;
• Plone for content management;
• Synfig for animation;