Orion Academy premises under construction

A tender has been secured to build new premises for local SEND school.

Orion Academy is one of six Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) schools in Oxfordshire.

The first stage of construction has already been started by Morgan Sindall Construction, creating a one-storey building with 14 classrooms. Additional construction will include specialist science, art, music and design rooms, a dedicated space for life skills where pupils can practice cooking, and a therapeutic base and social area known as The Bridge.

Full completion is aimed for early 2022.

James York, area director at Morgan Sindall Construction, said: “Providing modern, considered learning environments is a vital component to ensuring pupils with SEND can develop and thrive. 

“We’re well versed in designing and building these schools, and have taken the time to co-create our approach with experienced teachers, senior leaders and policymakers from within the sector.

“We’re incredibly pleased to be working with the council and The Gallery Trust on this project, and look forward to seeing it develop.”

Our Integration module enables schools and other organizations in the educational sector to link the Time and Attendance Clocking and Access Control equipment with the School Information Management System (SIMS).

The software plugin allows students’ and staff’s attendance records to be imported into our centralised system, along with the details of their assigned proximity smart cards. Staff and students can then gain, or be denied, access to areas controlled by the access controllers, based upon their access permissions.

Details of past and current students can now be exported from SIMS into our system. An automatic facility imports students’ forename, surname, gender and start date.  Students are identified by their UPN and grouped by their year and registration group. Staff details are also imported into our system.

Once attendance information is gathered from SIMS, configuration rules dictate how these attendance marks are treated. For example, attendance marks could replace existing clockings on our system, or be added as new entries.  Different rules can be applied to every day of the week.

If a school already have a card-based access control or time and attendance system, our card link facility ensures the records can be carried over and the card integrated.

One of the many advantages of our integrated system is that the list of current clockings can be configured to print automatically as a fire roll call/register when the fire alarm sounds. This is quick and effective, and much more reliable than other manual methods such as headcounts or reading from a class register.

Please contact us for more information, or to request a quote or an online demo.