Education Today Education Today Magazine
Sandhurst School in Sandhurst, Berkshire is a secondary school with 120 staff and 1,100 students who come from all over Sandhurst, Crowthorne and Bracknell with a number of children drawn from local military families.
It specialises in Science and Maths and in October 2011 Ofsted rated it as ‘satisfactory’. Adam Leach, Network Manager for the school joined three years ago with a remit to update the school’s IT facilities: “When I joined the network was not really fit for purpose. Since then we’ve updated the network, installed new cabling and wireless functionality along with networked projectors and as part of the refit we knew we had to address our printers.”
“The HP printers we had were just not as well-made or reliable as I’d expected. They were having real issues coping with Windows 7 and I knew we needed to increase the capacity of printers around the school as it just wasn’t appropriate to have students wandering around looking for an available printer. We only had one colour printer available to our students which simply wasn’t meeting the demand. The colour printer itself was slow and the print quality wasn’t acceptable so I knew we had to make real improvements.”
Like every school, the Sandhurst School team was seeking robust build quality, a high yield on toners and significant financial savings. The school also has a major focus on being ‘green’ as Adam explains: “We have a major initiative to be green, which is good both for the environment and financially, and I knew that we needed to consider that in selecting a vendor.
When KYOCERA Document Solutions contacted me to offer a consultation on how I could achieve my goals and save money, the timing was ideal. I spoke to the KYOCERA experts and realised that through their channel partners they could provide reliable printers based on sustainable print technology. I was also very impressed that the printers were so feature-rich and offered duplex functionality at no extra cost – that and the inexpensive running costs were a key factor in selecting KYOCERA.”
Sandhurst School has purchased 12 devices from KYOCERA Document Solutions – one TASKalfa MFP and 11 heavy duty desktop printers including a departmental A3 colour printer which has been installed in the art department. The other printers are located within the school’s four main buildings: MFL, Drama & Music; Science, History & Geography; SLC; and the main school building where the heavy-duty, high volume MFP is located in the staffroom.
The KYOCERA devices mean that the school now prints duplex as standard and ecoprints wherever possible. Sandhurst School uses PaperCut print management software which allows the set-up of departmental cost centres. This provides a detailed report of all printing and enables Adam’s team to bill each department monthly for the both staff and student printing.
Adam continues, “We have been able to increase our printing capacity around the school and that’s made a major difference to both students and staff. The printers are fantastic – very reliable and robust and easy to configure with excellent print quality. They are very quick to wake from sleep and I’ve been particularly impressed with the toner capacity which gives more life and offers us a better deal. The drivers are very straightforward, I love the fact that it is easy to pick one from the online list and away you go. There is a fantastic little feature which locks the display panels which has been very helpful in stopping the students push all the buttons. Best of all has been the comprehensive mono and colour training which is free of charge to us because of our on-going commitment to KYOCERA. The training has really helped my team properly plan the maintenance and management of the printers.”
Adam concludes: “Over the last 18 months, KYOCERA has made a real difference to Sandhurst School. We’re offering more efficient and reliable printing to both students and staff and the printers are much cheaper to run. Our students know they can get sharp images run off super quickly for their coursework and working with KYOCERA really has been a success story for us. They have obviously provided us with significant financial savings but I can’t put a price on the happiness they’ve generated for both staff and students. Before working with KYOCERA printing was always an issue, now it is a rewarding experience for everyone. I’d recommend every school to seriously look at what KYOCERA Document Solutions can offer.”
