About The School

The City of London School for Girls was founded in 1894 with a conviction that girls should be given a broad and liberal education. The school educates 700 girls and has 80 teachers.  It is situated in the heart of London in the Barbican Centre.

City of London School for Girls (CLSG) is a leading establishment in the heart of London, pioneering modern techniques in computer software integration. Teachers, pupils and staff at the school moved towards a single system in 2005. David Libby, Director of ICT at the school, explained the background:

“Multiple systems led to duplicated data entry into different packages that didn’t talk to each other. This meant data wasn’t always accurate and this led to some frustration.”

David continued, “We then started to bring all back end systems together having created a new interface, the portal, which was used for entering and retrieving all data.” Double First Engage was selected as the school management software as it was the only system evaluated that met the needs of all users and allowed full integration with the school’s IT strategy plans.

CLSG’s portal was important for keeping a consistent approach across all systems which would then have the same look and feel as each other.

It was also heavily dependent on systems being open source to allow the CLSG portal to connect back into them for adding or retrieving data. This was one of the major dependencies to allow a portal to operate as intended.  

Toby and Sharon in the Marketing department have seen a large reduction in unnecessary workload with new enquiries being carried out directly through the school’s website and parents of future pupils entering applicant details themselves.

“We used to be flooded with enquiries that would have to be entered into our database manually, but now we don’t even see details go in, which means it’s working perfectly,” said Toby.

Following the success of the integration since 2005, the school is now migrating all internal systems across to Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010.

The school has further pioneering plans for the future with a ‘cashless catering’ system and, following the success of this, a school-wide biometeics system.

“By the end of 2010 the migration to SharePoint will be complete. We then see a future, not too far away, where everything in the school is online,” said David Libby.