Relationships with local schools

[FreeWill]

Many apologies if this has been asked before; I searched to no avail..

Does your department any have links to or work with the IT Department of schools local to yours?

If it does - what kind of links are these? Such as collaborating when you come against issues with LAs, or problems within your own setup?

[Ryan]

We're an independant special school, so all on our lonesome

(But we're also not dictated to, which is nice)

[jcollings]

WE collaborate with other equal schools and support our feeder primary schools but I can only pick one option on the vote.

[FreeWill]

@jcollings:
Sorry about that, my mistake when I created the poll.

I can't edit the poll settings - please could a mod / admin be so kind as to change the settings to allow more than one option to be checked? Thank you!

[Geoff]

We support some of our feeder primary schools.

[steveg]

We're a primary school, and provide support to 6 other primary schools.

Steve

[witch]

I could only click on one - our school receives support from the high school in the pyramid but also collaborates with the other school at the same level and offers support to the first schools in the same pyramid

[dhicks]

Does your department any have links to or work with the IT Department of schools local to yours?

We're an independent, Catholic, mixed prep, all-girls secondary/sixth form school, so all other primary schools and nurseries in the area are our direct competitors and we only collaborate with a local Catholic all-boys school. I do keep meaning to talk to the people at Alton College about Moodle more, though.

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David Hicks

[FN-GM]

We just talk to other technical staff or they come to us for advice should it be needed. We are not supported and dictated by the LEA we are pretty much on our own.

[dhicks]

We are not supported and dictated to by the LEA

Great, isn't it :-)

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David Hicks

[FN-GM]

I wouldn’t know, this is the way I have always known it.

My new school is just across town so it will be the exact same.

[speckytecky]

We are very lucky in having excellent links with the local Secondary - advice is invariable just a telephone call away. Also, I now provide a bit of routine cover for a local special needs school.

[sidewinder]

We're a technology college so apparantly have to provide support to feeder schools

Its not something I really like myself...it means that one member of our team is only on site 1 morning a week, rest of the time shes at primary schools, plus theres a load of laptops that always have to be moved from school to school.
And then, we lose the most experianced member of our team for at least a day a week while he provides tech support to schools.

Ive got no problem with the idea of supporting primaries but I think we go slightly over the top. For example when some primaries now have several IT suites, should they not have some sort of support contract instead of relying on us? Should they not be factoring support in when they budget for equipment?
If its just a few computers obviously its a bit different

[richard.thomas]

We're an academy and we sell ICT support to primary schools and offices

[elsiegee40]

Another independent all on our own... the local schools are competitors, so officially we share very little information.