George Spencer Academy is a National Teaching School and the lead school in the George Spencer Teaching School Alliance. Its high quality education for students of all abilities has been recognised in Ofsted inspections, where they recently achieved grade 1s in all categories.
As a National Teaching School, the Academy helps to provide high-quality training and development to new and experienced staff for other schools. This requires a secure visitor management system to accommodate the arrival of many visitors attending seminars, etc. alongside the schools own staff and students.
It was necessary to improve the site security to meet Ofsted specifications, while allowing easy access for school staff, students and authorised visitors.
Nottingham based, Advanced IT Services provide IT support and hosting services to many organisations including educational establishments. For this challenge, they chose to work with Nortech to integrate the latest ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) system from Nedap into the existing Net2 access control system in order to provide a solution that improves site security by controlling and monitoring vehicle access to the site.
For pre-booked visits, the visitors’ vehicle details can be easily added to the controlled access system software, which automatically allows them entry to the Academy car park. The same system also records the entry and exit of staff and student vehicles, improving site security.
The ANPR Access HD system, supplied and supported by Nortech, is manufactured by Nedap Identification Systems. The ANPR camera reads the number plates of approaching vehicles and passes the data to a Wiegand Interface Module, which converts the number plate characters into a standard access control ID format that can be recognised by the access control system, so that a barrier or gate can be opened automatically when a valid number plate is detected.
“The Nortech kit integrated very well with the existing Net2 access control system. We already have two more academy schools interested in the same system” - Ashley Woodward, Telecoms Engineer Advanced IT Services
