VIEWS
The better road to audio-visual equipment maintenance for the modern schools
Comment by MIKE HARLINGTON, Managing director, Halcyon Audio Consulting
When I was at school in the 70’s and 80’s there was very little audio- visual equipment in school Using whatever the school owned was a special event; a huge projector and screen were hired in for occasions such as Christmas.
As I started senior school in the early eighties watching pre-recorded educational tapes on Betamax became a regular part of our curriculum. Who could forget the badly presented sex education classes our generation endured to save our teachers’ embarrassment?
However, audio-visual equipment has become an ever more important feature of classrooms and learning environments over the last 20 years.
Most classrooms now have loudspeakers, amplifiers, smartboards and projectors, on top of computers. This is an investment of several thousands of pounds and, when schools and academies are growing in size, this can be several hundreds of thousands of pounds of investment for the whole school, before even considering any dedicated performance spaces with their special needs.
This massive investment usually has one running issue: it is not looked after properly. This equipment needs to be looked after by specialists, or it will degrade in time, denying teachers and pupils their modern educational tools. It’s easy to skip servicing requirements: aging projector lamps mangle colours and die, cooling vents are blocked, loudspeakers are incorrectly positioned, amplifier settings are wrong… a failure is easy to spot, but recognising a sub-par or degraded installation is a specialised skill.
Yes, IT contractors will be happy to include audio-visuals inside their expensive service contacts, IT departments will justify their budgets by extending their remit, but both will be stepping outside their sphere of competence. However, what is actually needed is a specialist contractor in the domain, who will look after the equipment, its installation and efficient running properly, on a regular basis. School cycles offer the perfect opportunity for offline routine work during term breaks and holidays. Such an approach is proven to lower emergency callouts by up to 83%.
Educational establishments generally miss an opportunity to save time, money and increase the educational value of their A/V investment by doing things correctly in the first place. Companies like my own take great pride in assisting them achieve that goal.
Let me add a concluding curveball by introducing a topic that should be addressed in a future editorial: BB93 says “In the Secretary of State’s view the normal way of satisfying Requirement E4 will be to meet the values for sound insulation, reverberation time and internal ambient noise which are given in section 1 of Building Bulletin 93 ‘The Acoustic Design of Schools’, produced by DfE.”. This means that a functional A/V kit is just the beginning. Making it sound right is the endgame. We’re not about delivering exceptional audio quality, but clear, audible and non-fatiguing audio, without disturbing the other classrooms. Clean acoustics are a specialty that no IT department can deliver. They are surrounded by pitfalls, some legal.
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www.education-today.co.uk Children will keep dying on our streets
Comment by MARK BENTLEY, Safeguarding and Cybersecurity Manager, LGfL
The public-health approach to combatting gang crime is an excellent child-centred model as seen successfully in Scotland. As Anne Longfield, Children’s Commissioner rightly flags in her latest report “Still not safe: The public health response to youth violence”, it requires significant funding and above all seamless collaboration between agencies – we are seeing great efforts in this regard, but there is still much work to be done. Children and young people need support, not criminalisation, and of course this requires significant human and financial resourcing.
As part of our work with Serenity Welfare training schools about
county lines abuse, we always highlight the fact that gangs do not limit their activities to deprived areas or to older, secondary children – quite the opposite. Challenging an “it couldn’t happen here” attitude is absolutely critical to this, because children under the age of criminal responsibility are very ‘useful’ to gangs, and the ability to operate in areas of low crime and high wealth can provide further income streams to these criminals.
We are also concerned about children falling through the gaps and
suffering abuse while not in school – it is very hard to identify children with issues beyond obvious bruising on a video call with others present. Teachers are making great efforts to check up on their pupils and to provide opportunities for disclosure, but realistically a child that does not attend school will not have the same opportunities to disclose abuse as one who is in school with trusted members of staff.
Local authorities have a Counter Terrorism Local Profile which identifies
the particular challenge of a local area – the adoption of a similar approach for serious youth violence would go some way to addressing the Children’s Commissioner’s concerns about the lack of local knowledge – these could be compiled by the local authority and made available to schools, health and law enforcement to inform their work with young people.
Schools are often tasked with solving impossible tasks without the
necessary resourcing; they often rise to this challenge nonetheless, but information sharing and funding would certainly support their efforts to keep every child and young person safe.
End-to-end encryption is often seen as a panacea for security and
certain crimes, but is also provides a screen for criminals to groom children with impunity unless the correct tools can be put in place – this is where there is a fine line to tread between privacy and protection of vulnerable users. The new Online Harms Bill looks set to address this and ensure that without compromising security, platforms have a duty of care to protect their users. We hope that this will mean the use of positive algorithms to identify grooming: the technology already exists.
March 2021
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