Previous LA Managed Schools

[mgs1990]

Hi,

 

I've just taken over as Network Manger at a school in North Wales, and i am astounded to find that they are running a flat network that is centrally managed which most Local Authority schools are attached to. We have VLANS which separate the admin and curriculum segments, Having worked in the private sector and previously in a school across the border i've never come across such a setup. The complete network is in dire need of an overhaul but for obvious reasons i'd like to seperate the school from the local authorities network as it is slow, cumbersome and we have very little permissions to do anything other than account administration and general technician duties

 

Has anyone had any luck in separating themselves away from the local authority?

[mavhc]

For us Admin and Curriculum cross over so much splitting the network in two isn't worth any advantages that may be gained.

 

If they're paying for a network manager there's little reason to pay the LA too, just make a case that they're paying twice, and if you do x/y/z you'll be able to provide an improved service. But first ask all your users what they do with the computers, and what they can't do that they want to, pupils, teachers, admin, anyone else.

 

Managed LA systems are generally for primary schools that can't afford full time IT people.

 

As for the LA complaining, it's nothing to do with them really.

[mgs1990]

They are indeed paying twice, as they signed a 3 year SLA with the LA a few months before i started. The vast majority of the SLA is covered under the IT Staff here anyway. me plus one TTO technician only thing we can't touch is the MIS (SIMS) because we don't have the permissions for it. It's a relatively small secondary with around 850 students and 105 staff but that shouldn't effect the state of the IT here.

 

I'm currently writing a report on my findings ready to present them to the headteacher (who is relatively new starting last year). But i cant actually make any changes at the moment as the SLA has taken the majority of my budget!! i have circa ~£500 left until March!!! Hopefully we can break away and things will get better for everyone but if i can find a school in the mean time that has broken away from the LA and show the head how things have been done elsewhere it could potentially help convince him.

[mavhc]

Kinda pointless paying 2 people about £50k total and giving them 1% of that as their budget.

 

Meanwhile find every single instance the SLA wasn't achieved, and bill them for it

[atcoates]

We had the same with our lea supporting a small admin network in each school. We gave SIMS to SCOMIS to host and just built their machines onto the curriculum network and never looked back.

[mgs1990]

Truth be told with the SLA they've signed up to I am struggling to find a reason to have any onsite IT staff at all.

 

Departments order their own consumables, projectors etc.. I have a plan to tackle this already which will increase our budget.

 

But the majority of our budget goes on the SLA and broadband costs.

 

I keeping track of everything that falls foul of the SLA at the moment and it has to be said the majority of the IT related parts are not used. So hopefully I can use that to break out of it.

[mgs1990]

We had the same with our lea supporting a small admin network in each school. We gave SIMS to SCOMIS to host and just built their machines onto the curriculum network and never looked back.

 

Our sims server is actually internal but licensing and maintenance is all controlled by the LA.

 

Ideally I'd like to pull the LA network completely and rebuild into one network for the school, shutting out the LA in the process,but What I can't quite work out is how to transfer the required date to the dfe and other bodies as the LA currently handles this but I don't know how we'll just yet.

 

Assumption is I could use a data exporter such as groupcall? and can transfer/export to a set location they provide us with.

 

I've never looked at scomis so it's another option I can look at.

[mavhc]

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/school-to-school-service-how-to-transfer-information

https://www.gov.uk/topic/schools-colleges-childrens-services/data-collection-statistical-returns

[mgs1990]

Perfect! That answers a lot in regards to the MIS!!

[mikes]

we have onsite IT support here (me), I am an ICT technician and we have no Network Manager. I run the DC's / Servers, the LEA run our switches (I used to run our switches too but they took that from me), we are on a giant WAN with all the other Schools. It used to be interesting as they hadn't firewalled off the other schools, so I could access other schools shares etc; they finally firewalled it all off last year.

 

I think it is par for the course, we looked into moving away from our LEA for broadband etc (some schools in Newport ditched their LEA for a BT line) - but for us it seemed the budgeting wouldn't allow it (or that is what I was told). We would have to factory reset all of their switches and reconfigure them, we'd have to get a new IP phone system (it links in with a central LEA controller); it wouldn't be plausible to do.

[mgs1990]

Funny how you mention the firewalling issue. We have the same issue where we can access all the other schools infrastructure and they can ours. The setup of the WAN is a nightmare from a security point of view as we can access/change things is any school on the WAN. They've used the inbuilt default groups in AD which is just a nightmare.

 

I'm currently in the process of doing a cost analysis for moving everything away from them. i have been informed of various issues which i would consider major over the past couple of years, So there's definitely some travel in the idea. We're still on analogue lines which so it makes things abit simpler for us in that aspect