Abbot’s Way school
With schools increasingly relying on digital technologies and cloud-based storage and services to plan and teach the curriculum as well as to communicate with parents and carers, fast, reliable internet access is now essential in education.
For community focused ISP Truespeed, pledging free ultrafast broadband for life to schools passed by their network is part of their ongoing deployment of full fibre, gigabit-capable broadband to businesses and homes in harder to reach areas of the south-west underserved by national broadband providers.
The Bath-based full fibre infrastructure provider is providing staff and students at 50 rural schools in the BANES (Bath and North East Somerset) and Somerset local authority areas free ultrafast broadband for life to support their education.
Marksbury School, Abbot’s Way School and Churchill Academy are already connected to Truespeed’s gigabit-capable broadband service. And all 31 schools that make up the Bath & Wells Multi Academy Trust will come on stream soon, ensuring 7,800 pupils and over 1,400 staff benefit from this award-winning service.
According to Julie Player, Head Teacher at Marksbury C of E Primary School, Truespeed’s ultrafast broadband service has already transformed school life for pupils and staff. “Before we went live with this service our broadband connectivity was so unreliable that we couldn’t really rely on online learning resources,” she explained. “Now teachers can now make the most of cloud-based storage for lesson planning, as well as a whole host of valuable cloud-based teaching aids accessible via interactive smart boards during lessons. Pupils also get to do more real-world learning in class – an important part of the curriculum – by using school iPads to access the internet and connect with local businesses. We have also been able to resurrect our dedicated ICT lessons.”
Gareth Wright and Hellen Lush, Joint Heads at Abbot’s Way School, a new forward-thinking specialist school near Glastonbury added, “The introduction of our Truespeed connection is a vast improvement, with speeds reaching 200Mbps. For our students, assistive technology is an essential resource, enabling them to explore, discover and thrive within the world of technology and support their general learning. The installation of a fast, reliable broadband service is crucial to any educational environment and we are very happy with the Truespeed service,” they concluded.
The firm’s community ethos also extends to providing free broadband for life to local community hubs passed by its network.
Founded in 2014 to help people overcome their struggles with poor connectivity, Truespeed started rolling out its network and gained a £75million from Aviva Investors in 2017. Since then it has connected over 100 communities and has brought life-changing broadband to thousands of people. Truespeed’s deployment methods include connecting fibre cables to existing ducting and poles used for telephone and power lines, minimising disruption to local residents and businesses.
Truespeed recently announced plans to bring Wells into the digital era with Gigabit-capable broadband connectivity for residents, schools, GP surgeries and businesses.
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