Case Study - Overley Hall School

Overley Hall School in Wellington, Shropshire, is an independent school for pupils with a range of complex needs, including autism and learning disabilities.

We have worked with Overley for many years, providing them with IT support since 2006! When they were looking to replace the ageing telephones systems they had across their four sites they came straight to us.

Case Studies Overley Hall School

The Problems

Integration: All four sites had separate phone numbers, calls could not be transferred between them, and they had no fallback if one site could not answer calls.

ISDN: The main school site used legacy ISDN lines; ISDN will no longer be available after 2025.

PSTN: The remote sites just had a single PSTN line, there was no voicemail or call transfer capabilities.

Reliability: The existing telecoms provider would regularly have issues getting basic problems resolved, causing real problems for the staff and parents. 

The Solution

After sitting down with the team at Overley, we worked on a solution to not only solve the problems they already had, but to offer real improvements and add value and features to their telephone systems.

  • We installed a 1GB leased line service on the main school site. This not only provided the capacity for the new telephone system but also significantly improved the internet connectivity across the school.
  • We deployed 3CX, a cloud- based telephone system. As it’s in the cloud, this meant that if staff needed to work from home, the school needed to close (Covid!) or there were any local connectivity issues, then vital calls to and from parents will still work.
  • All sites now run from one centrally managed system, they all have the same advanced features: voicemail, music on hold, call recording, call reporting, mobile support etc
  • If one of the remote sites is closed, then calls are automatically routed to the main school site.
 

It was vital that calls were not missed during the migration from the old systems to the new system.

  • First, we installed the dedicated fibre line and thoroughly tested it.
  • We set up the new telephone system alongside the old ones, this allowed us to deliver training to users and fine-tune the set-up before it went live.
  • We ported from one site at a time, this allowed us to ensure everything was working exactly as it should before we moved on to the next site.
 
You can read more about our Business Telephone Systems here and you can find out more about Overley Hall School here