To approve a loan from school balances of £50,000 to Madley Primary School to enable the upgrade and replacement of their ICT infrastructure and to refurbish their ICT suite.

The school has recently conducted an IT infrastructure review and found the current hardware and technical infrastructure to be outdated and no longer fit for purpose; their previous hardware refresh took place in 2002 with adhoc maintenance, repair and exchange to date. The school have been advised that there is an imminent risk of failure of the server which could result in a loss of data.

The project will refresh the existing desktop hardware including a migration to Windows 10 with full cloud capability and supporting infrastructure, and the migration of data to SharePoint.  As a result of this upgrade, the infrastructure lifespan will be in excess of 10 years, with the hardware lifespan between 7-9 years.

The IT suite will be refurbished with new fixtures and fittings (benches and seating) and the flooring replaced.

That:

(a)       A capital loan of £50k to Madley Primary School be approved at 0% interest, repayable from April 2020 in five instalments of £10k to enable the upgrade and replacement of their ICT infrastructure and to refurbish their ICT suite including replacing the flooring.

1.         The alternative option is not to grant the loan as requested and in which case the school will have to either not undertake the upgrade or fund it from their own budget.