London Grid for Learning to save schools a total of £16m and deliver ‘more for less’ to UK Schools

The London Grid for Learning (LGfL), a charitable trust which serves a consortium of local authorities and schools has signed a record deal with Virgin Media which will enable it to save its schools a total of £16m over 5 years off their current charges, while adding 130,000Mbps of speed to schools’ connections.  By serving as a publicly owned central purchasing body, LGfL helps schools, local councils and other public sector organisations to secure high speed, uncontended connections, sophisticated safeguarding and filtering software, and award-winning educational content, without the burden and delay of running multiple costly tendering processes.

The new contract extension offer has already been launched to the first schools with well over 1000 schools deciding almost immediately to take advantage of more speed for less cost. The very first school to return the renewal to LGfL was Raynes Park High School in Merton.  When asked why the school felt confident to renew with LGfL, Barry Pratt the Projects and Operations Manager said, “The service is really good, particularly since the launch of LGfL 2.0 in 2011.  It’s extremely reliable and there is so much value-added. For myself and our finance team it’s just about one of the easiest decisions we’ve ever made.  We have looked around before and thought we might just about get broadband for the money we were paying then, but when you add in Enterprise-class virus protection, full Exchange email, the curriculum content our teachers use and everything else, there’s no comparison. The new deal – doubling the bandwidth and paying less, is just more good news.”

“There has never been a more important time than this to use London schools’ collective buying power to achieve the best value services,” said Brian Durrant, Chief Executive, London Grid for Learning Trust. “With the right learning tools and technology in place, every child can be empowered to have the best chance in life. A dynamic and technically advanced learning environment will be at the heart of every London school in the future and with this infrastructure in place, a new era of learning can begin.”

“As public sector organisations are faced with ever more challenging efficiency targets, the ability to securely share services across council or government departments will be a considerable benefit. By using London Grid’s new LondonPSN procurement, any Local Authority will be able to avoid the delay and high cost of running yet another procurement and purchase services that will harness efficiencies as well as benefit from more affordable prices,” said Mr Durrant.

For more information regarding the London Grid for Learning including their BETT 2016 finalist nominations please see: http://www.lgfl.net/Pages/default.aspx