The project, led by nmcn, a listed East Midlands construction company, has begun, and will increase the school’s maximum intake to 1,500. CBP Architects and GNA Surveyors are managing the project.

 

In order to make space for the improvements and additions, older buildings such as a hall and a gym have been demolished. 

 

The expansion was funded partly through the Government’s Condition Improvement Fund, which resulted in £3m. Nottingham City Council also gave the school an additional £1m Basic Needs Funding contribution.

 

Fernwood School headteacher Paul Burke said: "I’m thrilled that work to expand our school is now underway. In recent years, there have been children in our catchment area who have not been able to secure a place at Fernwood. With this expansion, we shouldn’t have any more disappointed families.

"I’m proud that Fernwood is recognised as an Outstanding school by Ofsted and I know how popular we are with parents.

 

"We want to be able to offer places at our school for as many pupils as possible."

 

Cllr Neghat Khan, portfolio holder for education and skills at Nottingham City Council, added: "Parents rightly expect good school places, close to home, and that’s what we’ve been working hard to deliver.

 

"To allow this project to happen, we were competing for funding with schools right across the country so for the bid to be successful shows just how important this expansion is.

 

"The council’s £1m contribution to the projectagain underlines our strategy of seeking to help Good and Outstanding-rated schools to expand where there is increasing demand."

 

Source: Insider Media Midlands

 

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Our Integration module enables schools and other organizations in the educational sector to integrate our Time and Attendance Clocking and Access Control equipment with the School Information Management System (SIMS).

 

The software plugin allows student and staff attendance records to be imported into our centralised system, along with the details of their assigned proximity smart cards. Staff and students can then gain, or be denied, access to areas controlled by the access controllers, based upon their access permissions.

 

Details of past and current students can now be exported from SIMS into our system. An automatic facility imports students’ forenames, surnames, genders and start dates.  Students are identified by their UPN and grouped by their year and registration group. Staff details are also imported into our system. 

 

Once attendance information is gathered from SIMS, configuration rules dictate how these attendance marks are treated. For example, attendance marks could replace existing clockings on our system, or be added as new entries.  Different rules can be applied to every day of the week.

 

If a school already have a card-based access control or time and attendance system, our card link facility ensures the records can be carried over and the card integrated. 

 

One of the many advantages of our integrated system is that the list of current clockings can be configured to print automatically as a fire roll call/register when the fire alarm sounds. This is quick and effective, and much more reliable than other manual methods such as headcounts or reading from a class register.