Educational IT Jobs Thread, ICT Staff Structure in United Kingdom (UK) Specific Forums; What is the typical structure of an IT Support deaprtment?
What sort of involvment and communication is there between SMT ...
From previous threads on here it is extremely varied.
I have attached a pdf of the structure of my place (where I am the equivalent of an assistant head) but we are far from ordinary.
If your Senior Management have been on SLICT / TeamSLICT they will know that devolved leadership is vital to effective use and development of ICT / IT across the whole school.
Some schools have a small working group who work together to plan and implement the ICT strategy and this can include a member of Senior Management, the Head of ICT (as a discrete subject), the Network Manager / Senior Technician, the Head of department for whatever subject you have a specialism in, key teachers (ASTs, leading practitioners) and key Associate Staff (Data Manager, etc).
Some schools have one person with the vision ... and when they have gone you are often left with nothing ... or just the vision of the next person (which may be completely different to the previous version!) ... better to have a 3 - 5 year strategy based around the whole school strategy that has different people looking after the relevant areas.
It would be interesting to evaluate both NM and Head of Department/Assistant Head using the same job evaluation scheme, you'd probably find them comparable, Probably the teaching post would score higher in 'emotional demands' for the job (looking after children) but I suspect the NM would score higher in the breadth of responsibility and the depth of responsibility. Theres also a local demand that can be taken into account, so don't choose a maths/science (in demand) teacher as a comparison if you want to make an equal pay claim.
Remember - Equal pay claims can be backdated 6 yrs
I have just been offered the job of SLICT (Strategic Leader of ICT) above the ICT co-ordinator as she does not have the capacity of strategically planning the ICT whole school because she knows nothing about networks and how they operate.
The only thing is that I suspect that she as head of ICT dept will be paid more for that than I will for SLICT.
So basically Tony, you shove all your tasks onto your NM
Nice way to earn a good salary, look good AND do sod all..
I wish ... Stephen has gone and sold out ... he is on a .2 timetable now :-(
Yes ... I do not do tech support anymore ... I am manglement. It is a pure figment of people's imagination if I have been in at the weekend unboxing kit and setting up rooms, or patching SIMS.
@Butuz
We have 450 desktops, 30 thin clients (rising to 90 in 3 weeks time), 120+ staff laptops, 50+ classroom laptops, 250+ student laptops (this takes up a high proportion of our time).
14 physical server and 4 virtual, Cisco WLAN (with controller), ID Cards and door control system,
A vanilla setup using WDS (in compatibility mode as we still have a few RIS images left), email is on FirstClass at the moment but we are moving to a hosted Exchange solution (as part of the county MLE), pretty much everything is done in house where possible, except for cabling (been there, crawled through the roof, can't see the point putting the team through it when it works out quicker and is certified by people who do it day in, day out!)
The thing that takes up a lot of time? Being flexible and fitting round the school rather than dictating how things should be. This is the thing that worries me about BSF more than anything else ... we try to be flexible and think of ways we can make things better and more effective for staff, not conform to a baseline.
We could slim down to a 3 man team (remove AV to just giving departments the kit and let them get on with it, drop the student placement giving us less time to sort problems with the student laptops, don't bother with the website, all take lunchtimes and breaks at the same time, no SLA or helpdesk, no remote access ... ) but I can honestly say that there is never a time when there is not something new to get their teeth into or plan for.
The job roles specified are really just a pointer for staff so that they go to a specific person ... that person may delegate it out to someone else if they are busy. At the moment most of the Mac stuff gets delegated to me ... not that I mind ... it is far easier than doing Windows admin really on a per machine ratio in my experience.