We took the view of moving away from Active Directory and moved to Azure and Intune; meaning we did not have the cost of connecting the schools together with a WAN, while still enabling any user to logon to any academy device. Our ISP has provided us with a site VPN solution so we can still access each other local networks for RDP etc while keeping costs down.
Our IT team is slowly growing, we have 6 primaries + 1 secondary. 3 IT tech + 1 MAT IT lead at secondary + 5 IT Tech (3 permanent + 2 Apprentices) covering the primaries. We tend to spend a lot of time at each others sites as we all have different areas of expertise.
We are slowly removing servers from each school. By Xmas, all primaries will move from 1 admin + 1 curriculum server to just 1 school server, with a view to removing the last servers ASAP when we can switch to cloud services such as Printex rather than Papercut.