John Gulson Primary School is a large primary school located in Coventry, Warwickshire. With a strong focus on ensuring every child realises their full potential, John Gulson is an inherently caring school.
A core part of caring for the community it serves is to ensure that the safety and security of all pupils and teachers is paramount.
To this end, when completing a new build project to remodel the classrooms back in 2011, John Gulson first engaged with Century Secure Group. Rita Harrison, Governor at the school explains:
“As part of modernising our classroom environment, we wanted to make sure that we had the best possible security measures in place.”
“Obviously, as a school, the safety and security of pupils and staff is our main priority. We wanted to engage with a specialist supplier who had a clear process, a proven track record of working with schools and also was flexible in how they could deliver systems to us.”
Appointing the specialists
Century Secure Group UK Ltd were appointed as the security partner for John Gulson Primary School – implementing widespread improvements:
- New pedestrian gate access control system to protect physical access to the school boundary
- Comprehensive fire safety system covering zoned smoke and fire detection
- All encompassing intruder detection and alarm system
Supporting and maintaining
Since the initial installation, Century remain committed to high quality maintenance and support to ensure that the security measures work in the optimum way.
Rita continues: “Twice a year the helpful engineers from Century come out and service our equipment.
“The process works seamlessly. Century will contact me to let me know our school is due a service and we will arrange a date.
“This proactive approach to service and maintenance helps us to ensure that our gates continue to work effectively and that, should the need arise, our intruder detection and fire safety systems can help to keep our people and our property safe and secure.”
A flexible approach
As a school proud of its learning-first approach, there is a need to ensure that any disruption to teaching time and the school day is minimal.
Rita expands: “We teach the children to evacuate the building and follow the fire safety plan for the school if the alarm goes off. Practically, this means we keep any tests of the alarm during the school day to test our evacuation procedure.
“Century are really good at fitting in the general maintenance of equipment during the school holidays, before the school day, or after the last bell has rung to minimise disruption to pupils’ learning.
Why Century?
Having worked with other businesses in the past to provide similar services, for Rita the reasons to choose Century are clear.
“In the rare event that we have a problem, they come out quickly and work tirelessly to get it addressed.
“All of their staff from the customer service team through to their engineers are friendly, courteous and reliable. They respect the terms of being on our site and always work in the way we want them to.
“As we’ve been working with them for nearly ten years – we have also come to form great relationships with specific individuals within their team, which is a testament to Century’s people-oriented approach as an Investors in People accredited business
“Century give us peace of mind in the solutions they provide, the way they support us and in the proactive service we receive. It is rare to find service companies that consistently deliver on their promises – and Century always do what they say they are going to do.
“We are part of a group of several schools and are happy to share our extremely positive experiences of working with Century with them and indeed every other school in the UK.”
