George Ward School

The George Ward School just outside Melksham is a large co-educational comprehensive, as well as being one of Wiltshire's leading Community Technology Colleges. It currently has more than 1,200 pupils and around 130 staff.

 In recent years the school has been plagued by regular burglaries and the school's Senior Finance Manager Graham Beattie turned to T H White's Security and Fire Division when it became clear that a new intruder alarm system was needed.

 "The school occupies a very large campus with an extensive range of buildings," said Graham. "There were several independent intruder alarm systems and even though the caretaker lives on site it was often difficult to check which alarms had been-set properly and which hadn't, especially with cleaners and other personnel moving around the buildings.

Since the school became a technology college it has been increasingly targeted by people intent on stealing high value equipment such as laptop computers. We had to improve the management of our security and T H White suggested a multiuser modular system."

The new installation was completed during the 2004 summer holiday, bringing the security of the whole school under the control of one central system.

Now, the status of alarms throughout the school can be monitored and checked at any time by authorised personnel from a number of keypads, while intrusions are instantly notified to a central monitoring station to enable a rapid response.

Furthermore, key tags are now used to arm and disarm the system instead of a code, significantly reducing the number of false alarms due to forgotten codes.

"We started by concentrating on key security points," Graham added, "but the beauty of this modular system is that we can add to it as we identify any further weak points. It's fair to say that it has already paid for itself in terms of prevented burglaries!"

"We are delighted with the T H White modular alarm," says Graham Beattie.