Bedales School relied on an extensive network infrastructure to support its academic and administrative operations. However, as demands grew, the existing network began showing limitations in performance, redundancy and security. Frequent maintenance activities often required disruptive reboots, causing downtime that affected teaching and learning.
Severn Technologies, a specialist in secure and resilient enterprise networking, was engaged to assess the existing setup and deliver a redesigned network capable of in-hours maintenance, reduced downtime, increased performance and full redundancy — utilising as much of the existing hardware as possible.
The school’s network struggled to cope with the demands of a digitally connected campus, with initial design flaws and misconfigurations including:
A modern, best-practice and scalable solution was required — one that would not only improve stability and reliability but also performance and efficiency.
Utilising Spanning-Tree as the primary resilience technology meant delays during maintenance and outages during failures.
Despite having enterprise-grade switching and the ability to use modern technologies such as VLT/MLAG, the network had been configured using dated protocols. This meant links were not being utilised and redundancy was limited.
Although a NAC solution was present, it was not consistently configured across the network and was under-utilised, missing the chance to add further security and auditing measures.
A thorough network audit was completed which uncovered performance issues, misconfigurations and security vulnerabilities. Severn Technologies successfully reconfigured Bedales School’s network to create a fully redundant and resilient infrastructure while repurposing existing hardware. The project tackled significant concerns related to redundancy, network architecture, VLAN sprawl and security weaknesses that had previously hindered performance and caused downtime during maintenance and failures.
A primary focus was on enhancing resilience. By leveraging modern technologies, design best practices and our extensive experience, this was achieved.
As a result, Bedales School now benefits from a completely redundant network that allows for in-hours maintenance, guarantees seamless failover, and offers improved security along with simplified management.
Dual-homed edge switches, active port-channels and corrected VRRP ensure seamless failover with minimal disruption.
Core and edge devices can be rebooted or updated during working hours without interrupting network services.
Consistent ACLs, stronger authentication and strict port security reduce the risk of unauthorised access.
VLAN consolidation and symmetrical core configurations streamline network administration.
While original hardware remains in place, the logical and architectural improvements extend the useful life of the infrastructure until phased upgrades are possible.
The transformation has had a significant positive impact across the school community:
By leveraging the existing infrastructure, Severn Technologies transformed Bedales School’s tired and fragile network into a redundant, secure and maintenance-friendly environment while prolonging its lifespan. The project demonstrated that with expert knowledge, design and configuration, even legacy hardware can be optimised to deliver enterprise-grade resilience and uptime — helping the school continue its educational mission without costly downtime.
We engaged Jonathan and Severn Technologies for a health check of our internal network in June 2025. From start to finish, Jonathan and his team were extremely professional, putting together an initial report before coming to site to implement improvements, all of which proceeded smoothly, on time and to budget. I would thoroughly recommend Severn Technologies.
Head of ICT, Bedales School
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