A VISIT to Burnley police station was a real education for college students.

Eight public services students from Burnley College were given an insight into how police use IT to deal with telephone calls.

They were given a behind the scenes tour of the communications room, the nerve centre of the Pennine Division which covers all of Burnley, Pendle and Rossendale areas and saw for themselves how computer technology is used to deal with the thousands of calls received each week.

Communications room manager Insp Andrew Procter hosted the two-hour visit.

He told the students that in an average week they handled between 8,000 to 10,000 calls and the number was increasing all the time.

About 500 were 999 calls which were answered in about ten seconds.

Other calls were prioritised and answered as quickly as possible, the majority in around 20 seconds.

He commented: "Dealing with such massive demand can be difficult especially during peak hours or when there is a major incident which is where the sophisticated telephony and computer equipment we have comes into play."

Insp Procter explained how the different calls were handled and how technology like touch screen telephony and the new Airwave radio system helped operators.

He showed them the miles of cable and mountain of computer equipment needed to keep up with the number of calls flooding in each day.

He also told them of the problems caused by prank callers and people ringing up, sometimes using the 999 emergency number, with silly requests.