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Opens 11th March the job can be found at https://www.hltrust.co.uk/hollingworth-learning-trust-vacancies Questions can be sent to the Trust Operations Manager at [email protected] We are looking for a Senior IT Technician to provide support and management of ICT facilities across the Trust, supporting onsite teams with issues as they arise and ensuring that the highest level of support and security is implemented across all Trust networks. The post-holder will work under an experienced team at a Trust level. We are looking for an experienced Senior Technician with a background in the education sector, who is looking to develop themselves and share their skills and knowledge over multiple sites. Initially the post will be predominately based at Newhouse Academy to support a major refresh to the IT infrastructure, led by the Trust. The post holder will be supported with professional development opportunities suited to their career goals. Hollingworth Learning Trust currently has two academies, Hollingworth Academy and Newhouse Academy. Hollingworth Learning Trust’s core purpose is to make a positive difference to the lives of its children. Its role as a sponsor of both schools is to provide the support, challenge, expertise and resources necessary to significantly improve the provision for education. Our Trust exists to support school improvement and share innovation across all of our schools in order to raise standards, improve provision and unlock potential. The purpose of each school is to improve the life chances of each child regardless of ability, gender, social background or ethnic origin. Our Central Services Support Team are a key part to us supporting schools on their journeys to ‘World Class’.

Hi all, Does anyone have any IT Audit templates , they are willing to share? This will be first used at our current sites where we have all the information but will be able to collate it into a single document and for potential future sites with a view to a wider growth plan. I'll happily share the one I do if anyone would find it useful. Thanks

Are there any MATs using G-Suite For Education? How do you do it? One G-Suite tenant with academies in their own OU? Trust & Individual Academy tenants? Currently in a school that is about to be sponsored. The Trust have nothing in place yet and will initially consist of 2 schools. Both currently have their own G-Suite tenants.

It's a bit of a long shot I know, but my wife has a metal dance mat and one of the sensors is playing up. Anyone know if there are any companies that do repairs to dance mats or if there are any good guides on the internet for DIY solutions? She really gets a lot of use of her dance mat and the cheapo plastic ones tend to break too easily, and I can't afford to buy her a new metal mat as they seem to start about £150!

If you're school is part of a Multi-Academy Trust please note that we're pleased to be sponsoring this year's MAT Midlands Conference being held at the Orchard Hotel, Nottingham on 11 & 12 October. The conference, hosted by Sajid Gulzar OBE gives leaders from MATs, the opportunity to connect, share and find trust-wide solutions through speaker presentations and targeted focus groups. We will be there to showcase how we can help MAT's manage their schools' ICT effectively and help them build a smarter more secure workspace for the future. For more details, including the agenda or please visit our website.

Post: IT Administrator Contract: Full Time, Permanent, 37 hours/week Scale: H8 scp 23-26 plus £951 fringe allowance Salary: £30,151.00 - £32,909.00 Location: South West Hertfordshire with travel to nearby schools Closing Date: 9:00am, 20th Feb 2023 A Very exciting opportunity has been created in our Trust as an IT Administrator across our four primary schools! Working with the Head of IT and regional IT Managers you will have the opportunity to apply your own experience and knowledge to help us implement our Trust and IT strategy. The role itself will be based in our head office at one of our schools in Chorleywood with travel to the four schools outlined below: - Ascot Road Primary School, Ascot Road, Watford WD18 8AD - De Havilland Primary School, Travellers Lane, Hatfield AL10 8TQ - Jupiter Primary School, Jupiter Drive, Hemel Hempstead HP2 5NT - Lanchester Primary School, Hempstead Road, Watford WD17 3HD For more information and to apply please follow the link below IT Administrator - Danes Educational MAT

https://www.tes.com/jobs/vacancy/it-engineer-greenacres-scout-drive-wythenshawe-manchetser-m23-2sz-1991453 The Prospere Learning Trust are looking to appoint two IT Engineers to provide specialist technical IT support across Trust Academies including the development and maintenance of infrastructure / resources and to provide general support to staff and pupils. Under the direction of the Head of IT Services, you will also support the installation, maintenance, availability and security of the Trust-wide network, hardware, and software. You will support one of two clusters: Cluster 1 Prospect House Primary School located in Higher Blackley Manchester Enterprise Academy Central located in Fallowfield Grange School located in Levenshulme Cluster 2 Chorlton High School Chorlton South High School Pioneer House High School This is a permanent post, working 35 hours per week, term time plus an additional 6 weeks. The post holder will play an integral role in the delivery of outstanding IT support to schools and will be required to work across several sites. The starting salary for this post is Grade 4, reflecting a starting salary of £24,294 pro rata which equates to a salary of £23,575.

Hi all, I know many of you have already been down this route, serverless with a central school, point to point Ethernet etc etc. I'm curious if you could start again from now how would you do it? What would you centralise? Phones, Wireless, Servers, Filtering etc? Or is now the time to start looking into more cloud hosted services, I'm thinking Azure AD, Google Credential Provider, MDM management like Intune etc. Would love to hear everyone's thoughts. Thanks

Good Morning everyone, I am currently doing some research into WSUS and best practice for our Multi Academy Trust and figured i'd reach out to Edugeek to see how other Academy Trusts manage it across their sites. I have some questions that i've put together and wondered if you could share your thoughts? Do you have a central WSUS server that deploys to your sites and have you considered it? Do you just have a WSUS server per site? Do you cache the updates to your local server or do you pull them directly from the internet? How do you have your automatic-approval rules configured, Do you have a test classroom / machine that runs the updates first? Do you have a specific person who regularly checks to ensure it's working and managed properly and consistent? Any other insights or ideas about best practice would be welcomed. Kind regards, Jonny

Consider yourself to be a strong deputy or network manager in a single secondary school or similar? Want to become more strategic, working in both one school site, as well as with the MAT central office? Want to work for an established growing MAT on its way to 20+ schools with all the centralised projects, training and development that brings? This could be for you! You will need to be able to drive between Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire, and possibly further as the MAT grows. You will have the experience or the capability to work with all Office 365 (O365), sims or similar, MDM, SCCM, VMware, win server AD, DNS, DHCP etc But also manage services from a strategic position, assist/manage projects, budget management, planning infrastructure work alongside technology partners etc Seeing the opportunity for personal growth is key to this role, to move beyond the day to day operational management into more strategic operation with 40% of the week in central MAT office or assisting with new schools integration etc Benefits include, LGPS, 25 days holiday plus bank holidays initially (rising to 27), regular appraisals and potential for growing into a bigger role as the organisation grows

Hi We have started working with a large MAT and i was wondering if anyone had any naming conventions that work well? I am looking for Device and User naming conventions. The MAT have some schools with the same name so i am looking for ideas on how to overcome duplicates, especially on usernames. Thanks Darren

Does anyone have any experience of using Discovery Education content for a MAT across primary and secondary. I heard the Coding content is good for KS1&2 and Espresso news is good, but not hearing great things about the secondary content. I used Clickview before and liked that. Any advice or alternatives to look at?

ICT Systems Manager at the Minerva Learning Trust - Bridport - Dorset

Hi, Our school has become a MAT recently and one of the things we have to do in the IT department is setup a domain trust so that users at the new school can eventually use their traditional login details to access resources here. The domain names use the forms myschool.sch.uk and newschool.local. However I am having real issues getting the domain trust between the 2 working properly. So far I have: 1. Used OpenSSL to create certificates for all domain controllers involved in both domains. Installed these certificates and the relevant root certificate authority certs so that they can all use LDAP over SSL on port 636. 2. Setup firewall rules between the 2 sites based on Microsofft's documentation here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/179442/how-to-configure-a-firewall-for-domains-and-trusts 3. Setup the DNS so that _msdcs.newschool.local and newschool,local are available here as secondary zones, and setup myschool.sch.uk and _msdcs.myschool.sch.uk as secondary zones on the new school's DCs. These zones are transferring and replicating OK, and I can resolve DNS names for both domains on all servers in both locations. 4. Setup a domain trust (Trust type= forest, 2 way, transitive). I have enabled Kerberos AES encryption on both ends as all DCs are 2012 R2 or newer. I have also validated the trust using Active Directory Domains & Trusts, at both ends on multiple DCs and clients; all receive the result "The trust has been validated. It is in place and active." Now I want to add user and groups to certain roles, however I keep receiving errors stating that the domain controllers required to find the objects I want are not available. This is really odd because the MMC resolves the full domain name for a user or group when I partially type it in and click "Check Names". I have attached a picture of this error, and as you'll be able to see, the GUI is displaying the full name of the user object, and I only typed in the first 3 letters of the username and clicked "Check Names". So, the server is sending the request over to newschool.local and retrieving the user account details, populating the box but then generating an error that it could not contact the domain controller. All the DCs respond to PINGS, so ICMP is actively working between the 2 sites. Run a DCDIAG on all servers, and apart from minor eventlog replication issues, all AD services appear to be functioning properly. I also ran the command remotely on servers from my local machine to make sure that remote functionality was behaving itself, and this generated the same positive results. Any support documentation on the MS site points to DNS issues being the main cause, but as I mentioned above, DNS is replicating, updating and behaving as it should. All relevant servers for AD services are contactable and listed in DNS correctly. Any advice or suggestions would be much appreciated as I'm out of ideas now. Regards D

Hi, I work for a medium size MAT, I've just completed a migration of all of our schools individual O365 tenants to a single MAT tenant. This has made management much easier for me working at the centre however it has highlighted some bad practice around password security for a small number of staff. Currently I only have the default MFA enforced for administrators policy enabled, but i'm now looking to possibly roll this out to all users. I'm leaning more towards azure conditional access rather than just the default MFA enabled/disabled in O365, however there's an additional licencing cost to consider with this option. Has anyone gone through this process before? How did it go for you and what policy did you implement on MFA? For those who have enabled MFA by default for all users, were there any unexpected issues you've had to overcome?

Apply here: https://www.mynewterm.com/jobs/473796499/EDV-2023-LAT-33236 Website: https://www.learningat.uk/vacancies About ICT: https://www.learningat.uk/ict ICT Strategy: https://link.learningat.uk/ictstrategy Learning Academies Trust are seeking an enthusiastic, hard-working, and dedicated Deputy IT Manager to join our outstanding team and make a positive impact in how we can develop our technology to provide a secure, compliant, collaborative, and productive infrastructure to our schools. We are excited to utilise and invest in a variety of modern technologies and solutions to improve the outcomes and experience of our staff and pupils, and we hope you will be equally as excited at this opportunity to make a difference. You will be joining our centralised ICT team to provide technical support and to aid our IT Operations Manager in the delivery of planned improvements. With the growth of the organisation, this is an exciting time to lead a large-scale project to update and embed technology into numerous schools and enhance the overall operations and delivery of education within our organisation. With soon to be eighteen individual primary schools, the Learning Academies Trust is by far the largest primary school trust in Plymouth and the first education employer in Plymouth to achieve the Livewell Southwest Wellbeing at Work Bronze Award. The Trust is committed to supporting the wellbeing of all staff and is proud to work closely with official bodies to ensure we have a holistic approach to staff wellbeing. We are committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children and we expect all staff to share this commitment. This post is exempt from the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974; pre-employment checks will be carried out; references will be sought for all shortlisted candidates and all shortlisted candidates will be requested to complete a questionnaire about any convictions or adult cautions that are unspent. Guidance will be given to those shortlisted. Appointment is subject to an Enhanced DBS. Read more...

Dear all, Can I ask for some help from edugeek members that specifically work for a MAT? I am currently writing a dissertation for my Network Engineering degree. For my dissertation I would like to obtain some data specifically concerning Multi Academy Trusts associated with network infrastructure. Please be aware that I am not asking for specific information that will identify you or your school, the information you provide will not be used for any other purpose other than my dissertation. Please note that this survey should only take a few minutes to complete. Thank you for completing this survey, your responses will be extremely helpful for the successful completion of my dissertation. https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=bO09z_OQKUuKpqJMOJo3rALX-bAFDG1Ati3WRX3lQ6JUN0lVNkQ5SFZZSldWWksyUk9QWjMzSDhSTS4u Kind regards, Julian Addington-Barker Network Manager Cardinal Allen Catholic High School Fleetwood, Lancashire

Looking for best practice on this one. Just taken on a MAT of over a dozen schools. Staff and teachers will all use the same domain to make moves easier. Students will use the individual school's domain. Using ACM to sync SIMS to 365 then use the Google connector to auto provision users to the Google tenant. I now need to find the best way to organise users and devices in Google. I have seen various ways to structure AD in corporate environments but I'm hoping to get peoples thoughts specifically for a MAT's Google tenant. I've outlined below what I have come up with and what has been suggested by others but I'm open to suggestions from someone with experience in this. Many thanks! Site then object (this makes sense at first but then not so much when policies get applied to object types across the MAT): School 1 Users Teachers Students [*]Devices Teacher devices Student devices [*]School 2 Users Teachers Students [*]Devices Teacher devices Student devices Site then user (after writing this I realised it probably isn't ideal): School Teachers users devices [*]Students users devices Object then user (makes sense but the structure will end up being huge with 15 schools): Users Teachers School 1 School 2 [*]Students School 1 School 2 [*]Devices Teacher devices School 1 School 2 [*]Student Devices School 1 School 2 Object then site (I think this is the one might be the better option?): Users School 1 Teachers Students [*]School 2 Teachers Students [*]Devices School 1 Teacher devices Student devices [*]School 2 Teacher devices Student devices My next hurdle is automatically putting the users in the right OUs when 365 provisions them but that's one for another day.