For educators, it has always been our duty to prepare our pupils for their next steps – what that means and what that looks like has evolved over the years. We had the industrial revolution, the post-modern era, and now we’re living in a technologically based society that seemingly transforms everything in the blink of an eye, from how we communicate to how we travel to how we learn.
Focusing on strategy
When it comes to digitisation, it isn’t uncommon for technology to be introduced to schools in an ad hoc manner, usually as individual resources that either support pupils or support teachers. Typically the products come from a range of suppliers that are often not compatible with each other, resulting in increased workload due to issues like onboarding and teething problems. This becomes an even bigger issue at scale as a Trust, as these issues limit collaborative opportunities between academies, not to mention the inefficient use of funds.
At Greenwood Academies Trust, we wanted to flip this challenge on its head and roll out a comprehensive digital strategy. Our aim was to be the sector leader when it comes to using technology to overcome key challenges including pupil outcomes, access and inclusion, training and CPD, and staff wellbeing and workload.
We started this journey three years ago, led by our Chief Information Officer Stephen Sanderson, with a vision in mind. We wanted the strategy to be scalable, secure, for everyone, transparent, available, and clear value for money. We also identified four strands of work that we needed to support: an Education Network (for teaching and learning resources), Business Systems (operations systems), Innovative Educators (CPD) and an Analytics Platform (data management).
We started from a low baseline. For example, each Academy had separate, and often local, IT systems and approaches to using IT. Technical infrastructure, management information, learning environments and technical support were disparate across the Trust. The systems did not ‘talk’ to each other, there was no single sign-in and the result of so many different systems being operated simultaneously was escalating costs.
The drivers for change were clear: the need to cut costs to Academies; the imperative of providing security for sensitive data; the requirement to save staff valuable time and, above all, to ensure the final product was easy to use. Conducting our research, we looked at several professional services companies and agreed that a cloud-based solution was the way forward. It also become clear that using Microsoft’s Office 365 suite and Azure cloud would be the best way to secure the interconnectivity we hoped to achieve.