Pillar-box red doors and wall panels tell you this is the arts and media faculty. In a studio a class of BTec music technology students in headphones noiselessly explore chord progressions on their Apple Macs.
Kemmi Morgan, 17, explains: "It's a soul thing. I haven't finished composing yet." Her classmate Amani Simpson is aiming for a career in the music business. He is already writing and performing. "She's a very good singer. I'm a hip-hop artist with my own stage name Hav:UK."
The class is among the first intake of Haringey sixth-form centre, a £28m Building Schools for the Future facility jointly funded by the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) and London borough of Haringey. Soon to expand its 16-19 student roll to 1,200, the centre has facilities to die for. On this corridor alone I see a media-editing suite, a sound-recording studio and several session rooms, as well as a dedicated quiet study area equipped with books and ICT. There are also dance and drama studios. Head of arts and media Colin Johnson says: "Students are using professional, industry-standard video- and musicediting software: Pro-6, Final Cut, Cue Base and Logic. They can back up all of their work on the college server and we're offering vocational qualifications through to A-level. The special needs students use all of our facilities to make music and do performing arts as well."
Inclusion is a key part of college principal June Jarrett's philosophy. The college has a special department that caters for students with severe learning difficulties from the borough's three special needs schools and provides an integrated syllabus with high levels of specialised support and adapted ICT. The college has a mix of open-plan teaching areas and flexible classrooms. Student study areas and staffrooms are located within the departments (all colour-coded for instant recognition) with a central learning resource area for the whole college. Jarrett enthuses: "This is a centre of excellence for post-16 education which gives students access to a high quality of teaching and learning fit for the 21st century."
Besides providing a spacious, cuttingedge building on three levels, Haringey sixth-form centre is open to the local community; a fitness centre, training restaurant and bistro are all about to come on stream. A swipe-card system allows students access to the college as well as to store credits for photocopying, meals and drinks.
The ICT supplier, Ramesys, won a twoyear standalone contract to procure, install and maintain the sixth-form centre's IT system, intranet, interactive whiteboards, data projectors and other programs. The procurement and installation, including nine Citrix servers, cat-6 cabling and wireless, cost £1.2m, and Ramesys has designed the system to work with the London Grid for Learning's Fronter MLE system, which integrates student records with subject syllabi and individual lesson plans as well as being a platform for staff/student communication and a chat forum.
The service includes two full-time technicians on site and a telephone helpdesk. All are hard-pressed. Technician Lorna Brown says: "We have the usual glitches: interactive whiteboards and data projectors put in the wrong place, staff needing help to install software, and progressive installation of thin client and fixed PCs. The biggest complaints come from business students who find that the 500-megabit space they have been allocated on the centre's intranet is insufficient to save and store the screen grabs and graphics they need. Their sites keep crashing."
