User:Wjp27947

 William John Peacock - (Information Systems Specialist)

In 2009 John Peacock retired as the Director of Information Services at the City of Sunderland College. He joined the College in June 2001 as Director of IT. He was formerly the Head of Telematics at Newcastle College, a post he held for four years. He worked in Further Education for twenty-one years.

John was the elected FE Representative on the board of Janet (UK) for eight years and was a member of the JISC Organisational Support Committee, both national positions. He was a member of the BECTA Stakeholders Advisory Group. John is a member of the IEEE, the British Computer Society; holding Chartered IT Professional status and is a fellow of the RSA.

In his time at the City of Sunderland College John implemented the commissioning and installation of a new wide area infrastructure based around the use of short haul data services and VLAN technology, replacing all the colleges switches to create a full Nortel based Quality of Service Infrastructure for voice and data delivery. He was also instrumental in completely rebuilding the server infrastructure to improve internal delivery, moving to a gigabit backbone at all sites, implementing a central SAN based on a clustered server solution and offering connectivity to college outreach centres. I was also instrumental in designing and implementing a wholly sustainable IT solution for St. Peters sixth form campus in Sunderland. During his time at Newcastle College John implemented a wide area ATM based network infrastructure for main sites and outreach provision and was instrumental in creating two major IT centres.

John’s strength in FE was his knowledge of sector wide technology and policy issues, understanding that all FE colleges were facing the same challenges, of government led changes in funding, the more effective management of information, and changes to the curriculum and his ability to relate to the problem of bringing the curriculum and the technology together. Of removing the barriers to learning, and ensuring the closer integration of services, systems, resources, curriculum and staff in colleges and ensuring the “blended product” was fit for purpose. By his involvement regionally and nationally John has helped to raise the profile of the use of ILT in Further Education, as an effective delivery tool to raise student achievement and enhance the learning process, in line with national and regional ILT and eLearning agendas, ensuring that colleges had a voice at the highest level, reflecting the importance post 16 education has in the government’s education agenda.