Cirencester College

Making Old Cameras Smart and Secure

Cirencester College is a large sixth form college on the outskirts of Cirencester, in Gloucestershire. The college offers vocational training and the new T-level technical qualifications in Engineering, Health, Finance, Early Years, Business, Accounting and Construction, in addition to A-Levels. 

The college has undergone significant growth over the past 5 years, adding a sports hall, a multi classroom complex, T-Level and STEM buildings, an Animal Centre and the Gloucestershire Digital Skills Centre, and is continuing to expand, with additional buildings still under construction.

This growth has seen full-time student numbers increase to over 3000, with another 100 apprentices using the campus on a part-time basis.

The Challenge

The college already had an existing CCTV system of over 100 cameras covering the campus, these were a mix of Dahua and Hikvision Cameras. The college had 3 different recorders with no connection/integration between them, all three of which could only be monitored locally. This caused a number of challenges:

• Investigation time was increased because if you had to search for an incident across multiple cameras this might need local access to individual NVRs, you had to manually download footage from each NVR and save on a USB stick.

• Whilst the NVR's could be accessed on the network it required 3 different logins and you had to login and logout 

• Remote access to the NVR's off-site required a VPN making mobile access and browser access difficult to achieve securely 

• The current system didn't allow any room for expansion in terms of storage or hardware capability

• The search features were basic time based search. So fast forward and rewind until you see the person or incident you were looking for.

• It was complicated to use and had 3 different user interfaces across the campus

• It was difficult for the school to provide access to the CCTV for any users as they couldn't restrict access to certain cameras or remove the ability to download footage

• They couldn't afford to update all the cameras but wanted an upgrade path for cameras and a system that supported multiple camera manufacturers

• Uptime is critical for safety and security and their current NVR's could take weeks to fix if they were faulty or they would have to replace 

On top of this, many of the cameras were also quite dated, with poor resolution and no smart features. This made managing security across the campus extremely difficult.

The recent expansions and increase in student numbers had only exacerbated this problem, with the periods between lessons likened to “being at a festival”, due to the sheer volumes of people moving around the site.

Compounding things even further was the nature of the campus itself. Cirencester College is open plan - no walls or fences surround the site, which backs onto a caravan park and the grounds of an 18th Century country house.

While the college had no intention of changing this setup, the open plan meant people could enter and exit the site from almost any direction and at any time. If they were to effectively safeguard students and protect the campus outside of hours, the CCTV system desperately needed to be updated.

However, due to the lean nature of education operations, the college needed to outsource the entire design and installation process to minimise costs. One member of their security team had previously worked at New College Swindon, where we had previously installed a high-end CCTV system, and recommended that we be contacted to design and install this one as well.

The Tech We Installed