Key Stats
Reduced investigation time from two hours to five minutes
Reduced vape alerts from 15–20 per day to just two or three
Gained centralised visibility across a 10-building campus with 150 Verkada cameras
Enabled faster, privacy-conscious evidence sharing for IT, pastoral, and senior leadership teams
Background
Located along England’s south coast, Brookfield Community School is one of Hampshire’s largest secondary schools, serving more than 1,800 students across a 10-building campus. For a school of that size, visibility is essential — not only for security, but for safeguarding, student wellbeing, and day-to-day operations.
For Callum Stephen, Head of IT at Brookfield, the school’s ageing on-premises CCTV system had become a growing obstacle. The system was slow to load, difficult to maintain, and frustrating to use when staff needed to investigate incidents quickly.
At the same time, Brookfield was facing a challenge familiar to many schools: student vaping. The pastoral team knew vaping was happening on campus, but without a detection system connected to video context, it was difficult to identify when and where incidents were occurring or intervene with confidence.
“There was a lot of admin involved in our legacy CCTV system,” Callum says. “The natural progression was to move to a cloud-based platform.”
Working with long-standing technology partner Fastech, Brookfield set out to replace its legacy CCTV infrastructure with a modern, centralised platform — one that could reduce manual work, improve campus visibility, and help staff respond to incidents faster.
The Challenge: Too Much Time Spent Searching, Sharing, and Maintaining Footage
Before Verkada, Brookfield relied on a traditional NVR-based CCTV system that placed a significant burden on both IT and pastoral teams. Simply opening the software could take 20 to 30 minutes. Once inside, staff often had to manually scrub through footage camera by camera to find a single incident.
Without intelligent search tools or an easy way to follow activity across multiple cameras, reconstructing a timeline could take hours. Sharing footage created additional friction. Staff had to download MP4 files, upload them to secure links, and manage access manually. Because the old system did not include native face blurring, the school also had limited ability to share footage in governor meetings or with external stakeholders while protecting the privacy of students not involved in an incident.
Maintenance was another challenge. Brookfield frequently dealt with hardware issues, from cameras dropping offline to water seals breaking. In some cases, staff had to climb three-storey buildings to reset or replace cameras — a time-consuming and risky task for the IT team.
Brookfield needed a system that would make investigations faster, reduce maintenance demands, and support safeguarding with better visibility and privacy controls.
The Solution: A Cloud-Based Platform for Campus Visibility and Response
After evaluating its options with Fastech, Brookfield selected Verkada to modernise its campus security infrastructure. Today, the school manages 150 Verkada cameras and air quality sensors through Verkada Command, giving IT, pastoral, and senior leadership teams a single platform for visibility, investigation, and response.
Campus-wide visibility without NVRs or DVRs
With Verkada’s hybrid cloud cameras, Brookfield eliminated the need for NVRs and DVRs while gaining reliable video coverage across internal corridors and outdoor areas. Authorised staff can securely access live and historical footage from any supported browser or device, helping the school move away from a slow, maintenance-heavy CCTV model.
Faster investigations with AI-powered tools
Verkada Command gives Brookfield staff a faster way to find relevant footage. Instead of manually scrubbing through disconnected camera views, teams can use motion search, AI-powered search, camera shortcuts, and incident tools to quickly narrow down what happened.
In one example, the team used motion detection to reduce an investigation from roughly two hours to just five minutes — an approximately 95% reduction in investigation time.
Vape detection with video context
To address student vaping, Brookfield deployed Verkada Air Quality Sensors. When a sensor detects a potential vape event, the school can receive an alert and use nearby video context to support faster follow-up by the pastoral team.
Brookfield initially saw roughly 15–20 vape alerts per day. Today, that number has dropped to just two or three, helping staff move from guesswork to more consistent, evidence-based intervention.
Privacy-conscious evidence sharing
For Callum and his team, Verkada’s privacy and sharing tools have been equally important. Staff can anonymise bystanders with face blur, helping protect student privacy while still allowing the school to review and share relevant evidence.
Instead of downloading footage and manually uploading it elsewhere, authorised users can now share secure links through Verkada Command via email or SMS. For more complex events, staff can also consolidate relevant clips into a single incident package, making it easier to review, document, and share the full context of what happened.
The Partnership: Fastech Helps Brookfield Rethink Campus Coverage
Brookfield’s transition to Verkada was supported by Fastech, a trusted local technology partner. Rather than treating the project as a simple one-for-one camera replacement, Lee Anderson, Installation Specialist at Fastech, conducted a full site walk to understand Brookfield’s layout, identify historical blind spots, and recommend better camera placements across the campus.
The installation was completed over a three-week window during the summer holidays, allowing Fastech to deploy the new system without disrupting the academic year.
Fastech has continued to support Brookfield beyond the initial rollout, helping the school stay current on new Verkada features and best practice.
“Lee always makes sure that our team is aware of new releases by delivering in-person trainings,” Callum says. “He definitely makes sure we’re getting the most out of the system.”
The Results: Faster Answers, Stronger Safeguarding, and Less Manual Work
Faster answers for staff
With Verkada, Brookfield’s teams can now get to answers faster. IT, pastoral staff, and senior leadership can access the footage they need based on their permissions, helping reduce back-and-forth and speed up decision-making.
In one instance, staff used Verkada’s search tools to investigate reports of food being thrown on campus. The team was able to quickly identify relevant footage, compile the incident, and determine which students were involved. In another case, staff searched for a person wearing a hi-vis vest when investigating reports of a contractor smoking or vaping on site.
Stronger safeguarding workflows
By pairing alerts, footage, privacy tools, and secure sharing in one platform, Brookfield can respond to incidents with greater confidence. The pastoral team can follow up on vaping incidents more consistently, while IT can provide footage in a way that supports safeguarding and protects student privacy.
Less administrative burden on IT
For the IT team, the operational benefits have also been significant. The previous CCTV system required constant attention, from software delays and hardware failures to footage exports and manual troubleshooting. By moving to Verkada, Brookfield has reduced much of that administrative burden while maintaining visibility across a large and active campus.
Looking Ahead
Brookfield plans to continue consolidating more of its security operations within Verkada Command. The school is exploring additional use cases across access control, intercom, and ANPR, with the goal of bringing more entry points and workflows into a single, centralised platform.
The school is also interested in newer AI-powered capabilities, such as fence climbing detection and slip-and-fall detection, to help staff identify potential risks earlier and respond before situations escalate.
For Callum, the long-term vision is clear: a single pane of glass for campus security and operations — one that helps Brookfield stay ahead of incidents, reduce manual work, and continue strengthening safeguarding across its 1,800-student campus.
With Verkada, Brookfield Community School has moved from a slow, maintenance-heavy CCTV system to a modern platform that helps staff investigate faster, respond more proactively, and protect student privacy while keeping the campus safe.
