The Consortium Academy Trust

The Consortium Academy Trust is ambitious about the future – creating learning environments and excellence in teaching and learning that provides its children and young people with the best chance at a successful future.

The Trust’s vision is Shaping Positive Futures, supporting children and young people to achieve their ambitions. This vision gives a shared sense of purpose and direction and is something everyone can be proud to be a part of.

Along with these shared aspirations and values, the Trust is always looking for ways to drive excellence by improving collaboration and the sharing of knowledge and resources across its settings. Communication between and across its schools is a key part of this. But like most multi-site organisations operating over a sizeable geographic area, the Trust realised that effective communication could be compromised by not having the right equipment and infrastructure in place.

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THE CHALLENGE
The biggest barrier The Consortium Academy Trust faced in achieving efficient, seamless communication across all its schools was inheriting a mixed bag of different equipment and systems previously acquired by each site individually. This included both licensed radios programmed to operate at a single site only, and unlicensed radios that work anywhere but on the narrow free-to-air public bandwidth that is prone to interference and scratchy coverage.

This posed a range of issues for the Trust, from management, maintenance and administrative staff being unable to use the same radios at different schools, to limited coverage, poor audio quality and radios picking up broadcasts from other users, a security concern in a school environment.

The Trust approached Brentwood Communications in January 2024 with a brief to standardise radios across all Trust schools, and in doing so improve the reliability, quality and flexibility of communications.

Our solution

One of the schools in the Trust was using Hytera PD405 radios, and the Trust initially asked about adopting this model across all sites. We recommended the Trust go for the Hytera HP505 instead, a more up-to-date model that is in effect a direct upgrade on the popular PD405.

Featuring a similar rugged build and simple push-to-talk controls, the HP505 makes use of the latest digital technologies to offer superior signal range, AI-powered noise cancellation for better call clarity, longer battery life and convenient charging via a Type-C port. We felt these upgraded features would suit the flexibility the Trust was looking for from its radios, providing peace of mind that they could be used reliably across all of its sites.

We supplied some trial devices for the Trust to test the HP505 out to make up their own minds about whether they could see the benefits. After the trial period, they were happy to roll out HP505 handsets across all sites.

Along with the handsets, we also supplied C-shaped earpieces to protect confidentiality when radios were in use around learners and visitors. We also arranged licenses for all radios, again to protect privacy by ensuring each school had its own closed private network.

Explaining the impact the new radios have had across the Trust, Chris Clark, ICT Technical Lead, said: “Having the same radios across all sites has made everyone’s lives easier. We’ve really been impressed with the HP505s, the range and audio quality are much better than what we had before, we don’t get interference from external broadcasts anymore, overall they are very reliable.”