Trust IT Team

[colu]

We are currently reviewing the structure of our IT team since we have added more schools to our trust, I was wondering how other trusts have structured their teams, how many schools do you have, how many are in your IT team and which roles do you have?

[Norphy]

I work for a relatively small trust in SE London. We have four school clusters with nine schools among them.

 

Each of the school clusters have their own IT support department who are responsible for looking after systems which are specific to the school such as their SIMS servers, printing and suchlike. The size of the team depends on the size of the school cluster but they have 3-4 members in each one. We also have a central IT team who are responsible for infrastructure, third line technical support and QA. There are three in that team at the moment.

 

Overall, right now, we have 13 people in our IT departments.

[Ditto]

We are currently reviewing the structure of our IT team since we have added more schools to our trust, I was wondering how other trusts have structured their teams, how many schools do you have, how many are in your IT team and which roles do you have?

I think there might be a similar thread running on this topic - if I find it I will post. In my last trust, there were 3 secondary and 4 primary. It has only this year decided to centralise IT this year, so it's taken about 3 or 4 years. There is a Network Manager to cover all schools with the secondaries having deputies or senior technicians on top. They have insisted on having full timers and wouldn't offer term time only, so less flexible working and a contributory reason I didn't stay - oh that and a pay cut! I'm less familiar with the primaries, but each had an onsite technician. One idea with centralisation is to share the staff pool across local schools. The were also making use of IT apprentices. Overall, beyond the trust NM, they had about 2.5 FTE technicians in the secondary (on average school were about 1500 pupils) and about 1 technician in the primaries. The trust did not have a director level IT person and for me was partly the reason that they didn't really seem to have a clear trust wide vision of where they were heading and were missing out on opportunities. The only project I saw in action was a centralisation of ISP provider. The school I was in was the founding and leading school. It was desperately in need of a refresh in the IT hardware.

 

At an early trust, it was all primaries/infant. Again, it took about 3 years before any IT centralisation took place. A single trust level IT Manager was appointed. By contrast, there seemed to be about 5 finance/business/HR staff which reflects the underlying lack of importance placed on IT in the education sector. Again, there was not a really strong vision of where the trust as a whole was heading with its IT. The school sizes varied and one even had someone visit for a couple of hours every fortnight - and that was when password resets happened - yes, crazy indeed and crazier still was that staff there accepted this as normal. Staffing was no more than 0.5FTE per primary - I would estimate average size 250 pupils. One thing they were strong on however was to move all IT support in house as some of the schools were using external third parties.

 

So to conclude, the trusts were moving to a degree of centralising and trying to use expertise across the trusts, but IMHO both lack strong leadership and were under resourced. For me, you really need the trust to have an idea how it wants to use IT to enhance education, then structure the team around that. You then need to plan and properly resource achieving that goal.

[mavhc]

The thing is to make sure the existing IT people have their jobs improved by being in a larger system. My friend went from doing everything to resetting passwords, that's just bad management.

 

Remove the need for everyone to do the same thing, that's great, not like anyone wants to setup yet another adobe reader patch, etc.

 

But find out what each person coming into the new team wants, and what they're good at, share expertise, make sure everyone gathers to talk about strategy, give their input, make new friends.

[elsiegee40]

The thing is to make sure the existing IT people have their jobs improved by being in a larger system. My friend went from doing everything to resetting passwords, that's just bad management.

 

 

The thing is to make sure the IT function fits the need of the MAT. That’s the driver.

 

Improving the workload for the IT staff should be a side effect. Making sure all the jobs are “interesting” or “challenging” may not happen.

 

However, if a role in a new team is severely changed from a previous role (and a its regraded) then redundancy should be investigated

[mavhc]

Can't fit the needs if no one wants to go to work, they'll be unhappy, and then not do a good job, or quit. They won't be proactive, they won't be productive. Plus you'll be wasting your human resources, they'll each have specific knowledge about the sites they work at, and you'll lose all that.

 

Would be better to say the IT function should fit the needs of the pupils, if their education isn't the focus you end up thinking about the wrong things.

 

How can we help the pupils? 1. Save money so it can be spent on education, 2. make things reliable so IT is trusted, 3. make things easy so people can actually use it, 4. make things fast so using IT is better than not using it.