The new buildings that house the City of London Academy are truly impressive. Built with a contribution of £2 million from the City of London Corporation, the teaching facilities, assembly rooms, sports halls, dance and drama studios, dining rooms and teachers' accommodation are all fully equipped with the very latest equipment and technology.
As a publicly funded independent comprehensive school, the objective of the Academy is to provide high quality education for up to 1200 students from the City of London and Southwark with the emphasis on business and enterprise covering subjects such as finance, economics and business. The purpose of the Government's Academies Programme is to replace around 200 under-performing secondary schools located mainly in socially disadvantaged areas, with a new type of independent state school.
Creating a safe and secure environment for both students and staff, as well as a need to deter and detect any acts of theft or vandalism, was a high priority when the Academy's buildings were being planned. Security specialist PEL Systems Ltd were called in to advice, design and install a comprehensive security system.
"We recommended and subsequently installed a CCTV system that comprises some 50 Vicon cameras strategically placed around the Academy's site. Day/night cameras, to cope with varying lighting conditions have been used at external locations whilst high resolution colour cameras have been installed internally," said Dave Barnhurst, Technical Manager, PEL Systems.
The images from all of the cameras are networked via one of six Vicon Kollector Pro digital video recorders to the Academy's control room where there is a video wall display providing multi -screen output and a workstation for live and retrospective viewing.
Dave Barnhurst added: "Having previously worked with Vicon on other projects we were confident that the specifications of their products were more than sufficient for what we needed to achieve at the Academy."
