St Catherine’s School builds one of the first modern Wi‑Fi 7 campus for digital learning
St Catherine’s School, Bramley, refreshed its wired and wireless network with RUCKUS® Wi Fi® 7 access points (APs), ICX® switching, and cloud managed operations—delivering “invisible” reliability across classrooms, boarding houses and event centers. It also deployed the Cloudpath Enrollment System, which simplified onboarding for the nearly 900 pupils.
Industry:
K-12 Education
Partner:
Educaite Limited
Products:
RUCKUS Wireless Access Points (APs) RUCKUS ICX® switches RUCKUS One® Cloudpath Enrollment System
St Catherine's School is an independent day and boarding school for girls aged 3 to 18. Founded in 1885, this small, academic girls' school offers a friendly and welcoming atmosphere and provides a formidable education where the school nears the top of the league tables each year. As a school that prides itself in supporting STEM studies, St Catherine's believes in keeping their campus Wi-Fi as up-to-date as possible.
In their recent refresh, St Catherine's partnered with Educaite® to maximise its operational efficiency and future-ready the network for new educational technology and high-quality learning applications coming to market. Through the integration of advanced technology solutions from RUCKUS, Educaite empowered the school by enhancing teaching and learning experiences, streamlined administrative processes, and built a secure and efficient IT environment.
The Challenge: Unreliable campus network disrupts learning
As more devices and digital learning tools were adopted, St Catherine's campus network became slow, spotty and often, unreliable. Inconsistent performance, roaming disruptions and dropped voice/video calls occurred sporadically, delivering a poor user experience and affecting classroom teaching. As a prestigious primary and secondary school, St Catherine's holds its students, faculty and campus to the highest standards. Their curriculum includes forward-looking academic subjects such as coding, digital research and online content creation as part of its formal education. Their campus has a high device density with nearly every student working from a tablet, which are often all connected simultaneously. So, providing a campus network that's as high performing as their pupils has always been an underlying goal.
In addition to facilitating connected classrooms, St Catherine's expected its IoT devices and ed tech learning programmes to benefit from a faster and more reliable network. By upgrading to Wi-Fi 7, the school could also enhance their security, smart automation and streaming while being future-ready for what's to come. But to do this, they would have to find a partner that's experienced with a diverse, multi-building campus that combines historic spaces, academic buildings, boarding facilities, and high‑capacity performance halls on a 25-acre property.
The Solution: Seamless, high‑performance campus network deployed
St Catherine's partnered with Educaite to fix their slow internet, increase reliability, erase dead zones and deploy a high-performing network that worked seamlessly between old and new buildings. All while simplifying onboarding and streamlining network management with a single-pane-of-glass dashboard. In summer 2025, Educaite completed a full network refresh to add speed, capacity and coverage throughout the school grounds. They upgraded their wireless access points (APs) with RUCKUS, installed RUCKUS core and access ICX® switches, centralised the network management with the cloud-based RUCKUS One® and secured onboarding and network segmentation through the Cloudpath® Enrollment System.
The new APs allowed St Catherine's to deliver high-capacity, low-latency wireless reliability, which allowed St Catherine’s to replace many of their wired operations with wireless. Through the cloud-managed converged network assurance and business intelligence system, St Catherine's now experienced better visibility of the network, automated daily chores and tasked AI with finding better ways to optimize their network. Thanks to Cloudpath, St Catherine's also automated certificate-based onboarding and segmented "untrusted" access for internet-only connectivity—which was all accomplished seamlessly and was invisible to the users.
“The single most significant expectation of the network is that it’s almost invisible… it’s there and it’s reliable and it’s something that we can take for granted.”
Emma Watson BEng, MBA, head of St Catherine's School, Bramley
The Results: Wi‑Fi 7 delivers speed, scale and future readiness
With the upgrade to Wi-Fi 7, St Catherine's became one of the first UK schools to feature lightning fast speed and lower latency, while mastering the high-density classrooms featuring 1:1 devices. The network refresh not only relieved traffic congestion and coverage issues, but it also made the school future-ready for the next decade and beyond. By revamping the wired side of the network and deploying RUCKUS wireless Wi-Fi 7 APs, St Catherine's staff was able to experience uninterrupted Team calls while moving through the corridors—something not possible before. Troubleshooting became easier—for example, RUCKUS AI™ Analyst identified a faulty fibre transceiver which enabled proactive remediation. And the RUCKUS APIs enabled the creation of "student locator" modules that were integrated into internal teaching and administrative apps.
The RUCKUS ICX core switching provided more speed—a 40 Gbps stack link between server rooms—while offering growth capacity for additional devices, services and apps in the future. The modernised ICX access switching across remote cabinets delivered up to 10X or more network bandwidth increase, which dramatically improved device throughput. These innovative switches also gave St Catherine's a pay-as-you-grow scalability and lower power consumption (up to 40% compared to competitors), which allowed them to build a modern network that would also deliver cost and operational savings.
With RUCKUS One, St Catherine's IT substantially reduced the time it took to find actionable insights for mitigating any network issues. The revamped network allowed the older buildings, boarding houses, performance spaces, and sports halls to enjoy reliable Wi‑Fi 7 connectivity seamlessly without students or faculty losing connections or needing to log back into the network.
FAQs
Before deploying RUCKUS solutions, the school experienced a slow network that produced spotty coverage and dead zones. Pupils and staff would often need to log into the network after moving from building to building.
Because RUCKUS was instrumental with the development Wi-Fi 7, they were also one of the first to offer solutions that took advantage of the new standard. This forward-looking company matched St Catherine's values of being innovative and having hands-on experience in the education sector gave us peace of mind that they understood the real-world challenges that come with a large campus deployment.
Onboarding for students and visitors was simplified. Once logged into the network, they could roam about the 25-acre campus and still maintain a powerful signal. This created a robust yet invisible connectivity to all students and staff, which also gave parents and administrators a strong sense of security.
While the Wi-Fi 7 APs improved coverage and the ICX switches delivered incredible speed, the RUCKUS One cloud-managed network system powered by AI allowed IT to become more effective and efficient with their time. From troubleshooting to network visibility, this converged network assurance and business intelligence system removed the hassles of managing such a large Wi-Fi and created a network that stays always on.
Since the deployment of RUCKUS solutions, St Catherine's no longer had any complaints about onboarding to the network. The students roaming the campus or working in the computer lab no longer experienced dropped connections. The faculty can now fully focus on teaching the digital curriculum or use online resources without fear of lagging/ buffering issues or loss of instructional time.
