One of England’s oldest boarding schools upgrades security system
Image via Christ's Hospital School
Christ’s Hospital School has a long history, first opening its doors to 380 pupils in November 1552, at that time located in Newgate Street, London. In 2022 the school needed to replace their now obsolete security system with a solution that would be simple to manage while maintaining the security of the site, staff and pupils.
The school has around 900 students, more than 95% of which board. With 18 boarding houses on site, all requiring different access permissions, as well as the school buildings, dining hall and other common areas. It was imperative that the school’s new security system be able to manage a huge number of doors and users, whilst still providing a simple, user-friendly experience.
Christ’s Hospital’s new security system provides simple read in/read out access on all doors, helping to maintain the security of the site and its staff and students. As every user needs to present their access token to get in and out of a building, the Paxton Net2 networked access control solution can provide reporting on how many people are on-site, in any given building, and pinpoint the location of specific users in an emergency.
The school also has an alert system to ensure the students’ safety; the security team will get a notification if students leave their dorms out of hours. After a set time, should a student present their Net2 token to a reader to exit the building, an alert will be flagged in the system and the security team will know who is trying to leave the site (and from which building they’ll be trying to exit).
To further support the school’s unique requirements, a number of keypad readers have also been installed on the external doors of relevant buildings, to allow access and egress to temporary students who board over the Easter and summer holidays. Students will be issued PINs instead of tokens, which may otherwise be lost or not returned. The use of PINs instead of physical tokens in this instance saves time, admin and money for the school when the students depart at the end of their term.
The Net2 system has been in use since September 2022. There are now plans to further extend the system to secure all of the internal doors on the higher floors of the boarding houses.
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