As part of the Government’s Excellence in Cities initiative the London Boroughs of Wandsworth, Southwark, Lambeth and Hammersmith & Fulham were allocated funds for four City Learning Centres (CLCs). Each CLC was to form a centre of excellence for IT teaching and learning within its borough. Part of their remit was to disseminate good practice in the use of IT to enhance learning and provide a high quality teaching and learning environment with state of the art equipment for use by the whole community. The buildings themselves were to be statements of the importance of IT for the world of work in the 21st Century.

Icon Information Systems Limited was engaged by each of these boroughs to prepare the IT element of their Excellence in Cities bid and, after their success, retained as consultants on all IT aspects of the design of the four CLCs. This included infrastructure design (Extreme switches, cat5 & fibre) to create a fast, robust and future-proofed network to support the central work of the CLC: to provide leading edge facilities to pupils from around the borough.

The funding bids for Wandsworth, Southwark and Hammersmith & Fulham were all accepted as part of the first round of centres. The Lambeth bid was accepted and scheduled for round two.

We were very pleased to have had the opportunity to work on such important projects where we could help establish a group of high quality learning facilities for the use of the whole community in areas of deprivation.

The success of these CLCs lead to Icon being asked to consult on three additional CLCs in London (Ealing, Brent and Northolt) where we wrote the majority of the bid documents and then provided consultancy on all aspects of the IT provision from the design stage through to handover.