IT Support in a MAT

[techie17]

For those of you that provide IT support in a MAT, how do you work out how much you charge each school for support? I need to work out some costs on how much we should be charging for each provision and not sure if i should do it per student, per staff or per computer etc.

 

Thanks

[Ditto]

For those of you that provide IT support in a MAT, how do you work out how much you charge each school for support? I need to work out some costs on how much we should be charging for each provision and not sure if i should do it per student, per staff or per computer etc.

 

Thanks

Do each of your schools pay a 'top-slice' to the trust to pay for central services? This is common and would cover a number of things depending on MAT setup, but usually covers HR and finance. I see no reason why a top-slice approach isn't sensible for IT support, even if it means the that percentage needs to increase. Top slicing would effectively be pupil based. Ideally, you want to achieve economies of scale within trust for the benefit of all schools and I'm unconvinced 'charging' each school is effective in supporting that. If the trust does go down that route however, I think you'd need to charge for the hours the trust IT staff spend on each school as the needs will vary, especially if you are mixed primary/secondary. The variation is unlikely to to relate neatly to staff, pupil or hardware numbers. Out of interest, who has asked you to come up with these figures? The charging structure should be a decision for the trust finance team in conjunction with the heads/bursars of the schools - I don't see it as something for the IT department to propose.

[techie17]

Yes a certain amount is top sliced which includes HR Finance and IT. I was asked to come up with a rational on how much IT support is based on student numbers or staff numbers and if the school increases in size then the charge can increase and potentially justify another member of the IT team. Currently we have three, two of which are full time (1 x IT Manager and 1 x Tech) and one term time.

[Ditto]

Thinking out loud here. Let's assume you are at capacity (and if you are beyond highlight this), work out how much your teams combined cost is and divide by number of pupils. Any percentage increase in school pupil numbers can equate to an increase in IT support requirement. I'd also add 10% as there will be a management overhead. In truth, if you have a number of IT labs with 30 PCs, then the cost is probably more related to pupil numbers. If it's a primary with an hours Computing study per week per class, then it's going to be more directly related to teacher numbers. One thing to factor in is that the support need for non-teaching staff, office, head, HR, finance, admissions, exams, Data Manager, maybe catering etc. is mostly non-teaching staff headcount and perhaps could be factored in separately.

[Mr.Ben]

We take a slightly different approach, which is fairer to all. The manager (me) is paid by top slice, but the support service is paid for by the schools.

 

The cost of the support service is split 45% based on pupil numbers, 45% based on devices and 10% based on the average age of devices.

 

We take the costs from School budgets monthly so adjust when we know costs :-)

 

This nudges heads to heed the reports I hand to them on where to invest as newer kit reduces their costs.

Edited February 21, 2020 by Mr.Ben

[SVM]

We charge what it costs to provide the member of support staff as we are not here to make a profit or a loss which may happen charging per device/user, if you have a technician on 20k per year, add on the extra costs of pension etc then work out their day rate, if a school wants 2 days a week term time you can work it out from day rate

 

IT Manager is slightly different as depends if projects are completed in house or they just use 3rd parties.

[Edu-IT]

We charge what it costs to provide the member of support staff as we are not here to make a profit or a loss which may happen charging per device/user, if you have a technician on 20k per year, add on the extra costs of pension etc then work out their day rate, if a school wants 2 days a week term time you can work it out from day rate

 

IT Manager is slightly different as depends if projects are completed in house or they just use 3rd parties.

Who covers the additional expenses such as:

- Technicians travel costs

- Technicians devices (Laptop / Mobile)

- Technicians CPD

 

If a serious issue occurs at a school requiring multiple technicians, do they pay multiple day rates?

[Mr.Ben]

Who covers the additional expenses such as:

- Technicians travel costs

- Technicians devices (Laptop / Mobile)

- Technicians CPD

 

If a serious issue occurs at a school requiring multiple technicians, do they pay multiple day rates?

Because we are open with the costs to heads, we start the year overestimating our total costs by at least 15%, then take monthly payments, correcting them as we get to the end of the year either up or down.

 

The 10% of the charge that relates to age of equipment reflects the risk to the support team's costs of older equipment.

 

CPD, devices and travel are all included in the charges. We have £500 per staff member plus £2k for CPD and a £300 per annum per staff member for equipment (so a laptop replacement every 3 years, plus some tools).

 

We have RMM tools, Helpdesk and licencing costs to consider as well. All of these are part of the total cost presented to our ICT Strategy group to approve.

[SVM]

Who covers the additional expenses such as:

- Technicians travel costs

- Technicians devices (Laptop / Mobile)

- Technicians CPD

If a serious issue occurs at a school requiring multiple technicians, do they pay multiple day rates?

Trust pays for travel costs but this is also part of the charge to schools, it will be in with their on costs with the pension costs

 

Trust pays for Laptop/Mobile as it belongs to the trust not the schools which is the same with all Trust employees

 

All training is done in house by IT manager

 

If a serious issues arises the IT manager would normally go to the school as part of the IT Manager SLA but our technician support SLA is that we will provide an onsite technician for the specified days requested but in certain circumstances schools need to be flexible and the technician may be required elsewhere and therefore another technician will help out remotely.

 

If for example we need to re-image the whole school during hols and the time available for one technician is not enough we would offer another technician on PAYG at same day rates as normal.

[Edu-IT]

So I assume the trust top slices money from the schools then?

[Mr.Ben]

So I assume the trust top slices money from the schools then?

It is the case here - 4%, however the IT Support service is additional to this, but subsidised (my role is paid from top slice).

 

The ICT service averages at a cost of £3k per year per school.

[SVM]

I think all schools are top sliced in a trust but for us IT doesn't get much if any, nearly everything needs to come from the SLAs except for trust pays 50% of IT Manager wages for the work done at trust level.

 

The best model would be all infrastructure (broadband, switches, firewall, filtering, servers) along with the core software requirements, finance, hr, sims, Microsoft or Gsuite licenses etc and IT support are paid out of the top slice at cost so there are no arguments on what to spend on this as majority of headteachers are not interested in the support side, then on the curriculum side the schools can decide what they require as they are best placed (most of the time) to decide what is best for teaching and learning.

[CyBeRkId2002]

@techie17 - can't help on how to charge as we are currently undergoing this review ourselves, but can I be nosy and ask how many schools (and rough size) the 2FT & 1TT staff support?

[mavhc]

I think all schools are top sliced in a trust but for us IT doesn't get much if any, nearly everything needs to come from the SLAs except for trust pays 50% of IT Manager wages for the work done at trust level.

 

The best model would be all infrastructure (broadband, switches, firewall, filtering, servers) along with the core software requirements, finance, hr, sims, Microsoft or Gsuite licenses etc and IT support are paid out of the top slice at cost so there are no arguments on what to spend on this as majority of headteachers are not interested in the support side, then on the curriculum side the schools can decide what they require as they are best placed (most of the time) to decide what is best for teaching and learning.

 

This makes sense to me, without standard infrastructure (hardware, software, config) there's no economy of scale.

 

Do you have a hardware purchase list of things you've determined are good value for money? Do you require approval for hw and sw purchases?

 

Did you bring the IT techs from the schools into your team?

 

What do you do about the school that really wants thing B when everyone else is using thing A, and B requires way more support time (no oauth for online thing, manual install, buggy, lack of training in school). Or when 1 school constantly needs support for a simple thing that the other schools manage themselves? Password reset for pupils or similar?

[SVM]

This makes sense to me, without standard infrastructure (hardware, software, config) there's no economy of scale.

 

Do you have a hardware purchase list of things you've determined are good value for money? Do you require approval for hw and sw purchases?

 

Did you bring the IT techs from the schools into your team?

 

What do you do about the school that really wants thing B when everyone else is using thing A, and B requires way more support time (no oauth for online thing, manual install, buggy, lack of training in school). Or when 1 school constantly needs support for a simple thing that the other schools manage themselves? Password reset for pupils or similar?

 

We have a list of recommended hardware/software that we think is cost effective but this is not forced onto schools for example we have an ISP with a WAN that is cost effective for secondaries but not for primary/special so we install SD WAN and local firewall/filtering even if it would be easier to manage everyone on the same ISP/WAN, yes we still need authorisation from school for hardware/software purchases as its their budget.

 

We have not moved any existing techs over as yet, if they are in post they normally stay employed by school and we take on line management but will probably change in future to be employed by trust, new staff are employed by trust and then assigned to schools based on location.

 

I like to think our trust is different to others where each school keeps autonomy (unless in financial debt) so they can make their own decisions rather than the trust forcing solutions, the basics we would do if a school signs up to our SLA is change servers to Hyper-V and add to our resource domain for backups, VMs will stay on their domain, put in SCCM DP for updates and imaging along with a VPN back to central servers and look at migrating to our Office635 tenant, other IT solutions we recommend and they can take it or leave it.

 

Quite a few schools have different setups either because not cost effective to change or they do not want to use the recommended solution which is fine, if the tech spends their time fixing stuff that we can automate or make easier then this will be recommended but decision is the schools how they use the tech onsite (we do not have any schools that have not gone with most recommendations as it doesn't cost them (unless some new hardware is required) due to all projects completed in house as part of the SLA)

[Mr.Ben]

We are prescriptive about replacement networking equipment , to ensure Networking kit slowly becomes manageable under limited vendors.

 

We also prescribe the client equipment schools can buy -allowing Chromebooks, Windows or Apple devices - school choose from our list and buy in procurement windows, allowing us to tender and get best value.

 

Our O365, GSuite and ASM are single tenancies

 

This allows us to provide training across the Trust as devices and functionality is the same across devices.

[mavhc]

Adopting the existing technicians seems like an important step that seems to be often ignored. They likely have valuable knowledge to be shared, and will feel rejected when someone else starts to take over otherwise.

[Mr.Ben]

Yeah, I'd worried about it when we move the Trust into secondary provision.....

 

From the other side, as the person we becomes ultimately responsible for the service and the technicians, there must be a level of control - I think it will be important to make the incoming techs part of the central resource as soon as possible. If they haven't worked in a multi site environment before (we are 33), sometimes it's hard to see why things are done in a certain way - ultimately to make sure we all have time to do our job and to ensure the best service possible.

 

We already have far better IT CPD than I've had in jobs within schools