Marryatville High School based in the eastern suburbs of metropolitan Adelaide is one of Australia’s most successful government high schools producing highly accomplished scholars. The school prides itself on its innovative teaching and learning practices, diversity of curriculum and world class technology that combines to give a learning environment that promotes academic excellence and supports all students in reaching their potential.
The school offers a wide range of specialist programs including a coveted music program, a competitive course and special entry tennis program, a substantial international student program and extensive co-curricular opportunities which help to make Marryatville High School a dynamic educational environment.
In 2016 the school realised that the changing landscape of technology meant that a scalable, quality solution was required to ensure that the school’s investment in technology was going to be adequately serviced by its internet connection and plan. Discussions were undertaken with SABRENet to utilise their fibre services via an ISP and a solution was commissioned.
”The biggest reason that SABRENet was chosen to provide this service was its reputation within the education sector across the state, including its partnerships with other companies, like AARNet, and its flexibility and breadth of offerings,” says Nathan Burgess, Director of Information, Communication and Technology, Marryatville High School.
During the middle of 2018 a review was undertaken to increase the capacity of the service, removing the limit on student downloads, and to increase the speed of the service. At the beginning of 2022 Marryatville again reviewed their internet provision and decided to utilise the full bandwidth available, moving to a service able to peak to 10Gbps during the highest periods of demand.
Marryatville High School identified a major challenge for their school community as being able to anticipate and meet the needs of future learners and to provide student-centred learning in a global context. To this end, they needed an internet solution that was flexible enough to provide a service that could adapt as the school’s needs changed.
Through the SABRENet offering, they were able to change their service provision when needed, meaning that the internet based services they rely on in every lesson were always provided with little lag. This has meant that Marryatville High school was able to swiftly move to online learning, transition to rich video streaming, and utilise high bandwidth services across the whole 1600 student population. The school can also now rely on cloud services like O365 for OneNote and Teams, Autodesk Fusion 360 and ClickView Online without the fear of poor internet service impacting the learning of their students.
Students at Marryatville High School
As well as the students’ learning experiences, the staff at Marryatville High School has also benefitted. “Before moving to SABRENet the school would often hit service roadblocks including download limits which severely impacted our ability to rely on internet based services. Student and teacher confidence in internet services took a real beating. SABRENet enabled us to remove these limitations and combined with a steady program of technology upgrades across the school confidence has been restored in our services. Staff now have a real expectation of fast, instant access to online resources including high definition video and live streams and can plan to use on-demand services at all stages during the school day,” says Nathan Burgess.
Marryatville High School is always looking to the future and in support of its technology and learning goals, has plans to examine fibre redundancy when SABRENet runs optical fibre across the rear of their property. Nathan Burgess says, “We are in a lucky position that we are at a major road intersection where there are plans to run more fibre. This means that we will have the opportunity to have the kind of redundancy that most schools only dream of.”
Marryatville High School places great importance on promoting a sense of belonging and connection both within the school community, and to the broader community. This broader community includes the Kaurna people, the traditional custodians of the Adelaide region, with whom the school has engaged on a number of projects, including an active promotion of Kaurna language.
Developing genuine professional relationships with companies of a similar mindset who understand Maryattville High Schools goals, ethos and aspirations, is paramount. Nathan Burgess says, “Throughout our whole journey SABRENet has been a partner that we have felt we can rely on. Their services are high quality, have a focus on education and they have genuinely been interested in working with us and seen us more as a partner than a customer.”