SVM

ICT Technician (Kidsgrove Secondary School) job with Shaw Education Trust | 155253 (wmjobs.co.uk)

Senior ICT Technician (Streethay Primary School) in Lichfield, Staffordshire, WS13 8FT - 153424 | WM Jobs Senior ICT Technician (Kidsgrove Secondary School) in Kidsgrove, Stoke-on-Trent - 153420 | WM Jobs

Senior ICT Technician - Shaw Education Trust in Based at SET Head Office, Stoke on Trent - 144823 | WM Jobs

I would be interested in recommendations for cloud based filtering providers that have had little downtime in the past 3 years, PM if preferred I find broadband lines do not go down and I find cloud based firewall do not go down either which just leaves the filtering and would prefer cloud if possible (have started installing onsite systems for smaller sites) but its easier to manage cloud and normally more cost effective

I am sure Dave from schools broadband jumped into Exas forum thread previously highlighting the lack of comms...

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)

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.

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.

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.

You can have 1 Azure AD Connect server that syncs multiple forests, as long as there is a VPN setup between sites as the DCs need comms to the Azure AD connect server, trusts not needed

Did you sort this ? checked a couple of sites and some work fine and some get content is not available from your location

Its not always the software, normally the implementation. Lightspeed suddenly become stable once schools started migrating over to Netsweeper...

There are issues with filtering as well as webadmin, there was another post with schools commenting about unfiltered access, we have experienced it as well at a couple of schools.

Netsweeper agent issues today as well, could not find IP therefore default filtering in random PCs, support said its a wider issue, web admin performance improved tho

Yes, constantly and has been around before they started having issues recently, have a ticket open but nothing has been done about it