ACS International Schools

Background

Founded in 1967 to serve the needs of global and local families, ACS International Schools educate over 3,700 students, aged 2 to 18, day and boarding, from more than 100 countries.

ACS International Schools delivers private education across four sites in the UK, being Cobham Campus, Hillingdon Campus, Egham Campus and Iver Heath Sports Centre - the security for all of which A Plus Security holds the contracts for.

Challenges

The main challenge the client faced was needing to have constant ‘eyes’ over all the campuses, the largest is made up of over 30 acres of greenland, forests etc which is easily accessible.

Secondly, system downtime had to be limited, as even when students are not in residence, the campuses are still busy working environments and the systems ensure the safety and security of all contractors and staff.

Carrying out anything but critical repairs during term time is not allowed, so A Plus Security had to plan and deliver a tight implementation schedule before the students returned.

Solutions

As part of our scoping process, and drawing on extensive experience in projects like this, we established all potential challenges before we started work. ACS International Schools were very clear about what they wanted so this was very much a collaborative effort to deliver a very successful project with no disruption to business.

As we were upgrading multiple campuses, we decided not to run the install concurrently as we believe this approach shuts down all ‘eyes’ for too long.

Each ACS International Schools campus is system-linked and sits on the same network, so security teams have a view of all sites and cameras can be seen throughout each property. Our chosen approach was to complete one campus at a time, utilising a detailed programme for each area of each campus. We started with Cobham, then Egham, Hillingdon and lastly, Iver Heath.

Installed systems

Avigilon CCTV replaced an old, dedicated Micros Sprite CCTV system with NETVU software.