Multi Academy Trusts (MATs), a group of academies that have formed an association, are increasingly more common across the UK.
Multi Academy Trusts (MATs) which refers to a group of learning academies that have formed an association, have become increasingly common in the United Kingdom. This is due in part to the Government’s plan to encourage most schools to join a MAT by 2030 as outlined in the 2022 Schools White Paper, “Opportunity for all: strong schools with great teachers for your child”.
With this, the government is pushing the education landscape to become more competitive as academy trusts optimize their processes and technology.
However, as MATs onboard new academies this can bring some IT challenges that stem from the need to merge IT infrastructure, reduce costs, centralize services, migrate data, and manage technical changes across multiple schools within a trust.
The challenges:
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- Duplication and cost management: Merging IT infrastructure, reducing costs and centralizing services across multiple schools.
- Centralization versus autonomy: Finding the optimal balance between centralizing IT operations and allowing local autonomy for individual schools.
- IT organization and processes: Managing the technical changes, data migration and agility required to streamline IT operations across the trust.
- Cybersecurity: Ensuring security measures are adequate and streamlined across academies to protect IT infrastructure.
- Digital Divide between academies: Before joining a MAT, some schools may have had a limited budget for ICT, leading to a technology gap between it and other academies in the trust.
10 steps to overcome your IT pain points:
The process of merging academies to work under one MAT can seem never-ending and overwhelmingly complex. Where does one even begin? To help address the challenges noted above and facilitate transitions, from the initial setup of a MAT to onboarding new academies, below we offer an action plan for MATs to pool their resources and streamline organizational IT integration successfully.
- Audit your IT infrastructure:
Conduct an IT audit to understand all the current IT systems and software, infrastructure, data, security, policies, and procedures across the MAT academies. This co-produced and evidence-informed assessment of academies will show current gaps, what solutions are required to centralize, even identify existing efficiencies that should remain. The result will be the discovery of digital strategy targets, timelines, and limitations.
- Develop a mid-long-term strategy:
Create a well-structured, robust 3- to 5-year digital strategy for your MAT based on budget, resources, and prioritization. Implementing digital changes across multiple schools requires careful planning and coordination. Working with the legacy of different systems across academies and varying levels in digital transformation needs, up to a 5-year plan can be expected depending on the size of the MAT. Many MATs contract an IT Partner specialized in digital transformation in education to facilitate developing a roadmap and executing a customized digital strategy that incorporates flexibility.
- Streamline back-office areas:
Plan to centralize administrative, HR, finance and other corporate functions including IT infrastructure and support, and procurement. While centralizing these back-office areas requires a significant initial investment of time and money, it provides a solid foundation for long-term digital transformation and success of MATs. Also, this integration will streamline processes across academies, eliminate duplication, and lead to reduced costs through economies of scale while ensuring more efficient resourcing in the future.
- Phase digital implementation:
Initiate your digital strategy in phases. This will allow for more agile management of the complexities of implementation and minimize risks and disruptions to academic functions. It will also enable tracking progress, ensuring all academies in the trust can adapt and benefit from IT advancements over time. Further, a phased approach will permit quicker and easier IT integration when onboarding new academies.
- Start with the cloud:
Begin the IT integration process by moving the IT infrastructure for each academy to one unified cloud under the MAT umbrella. The cloud is much easier to centralize and adapt to an organization's specific requirements than any on-premises system. However, some on-premises systems should remain at each academy for processes where autonomy is preferred or required due to unique needs. For instance, those related to a school’s individual core educational principles, teaching methods, and curriculum design, or even access control (door security) and building management.
- Implement robust cybersecurity measures:
Prevent cyber-attacks by adopting a multi-layered approach to cybersecurity. Ideally, a unified cybersecurity system across a MAT is recommended as this reduces complexities across schools and can be more affordable in the long-term. While this centralization can spread a cyberattack through digitally connected academies, it counteracts this risk by allowing for increased monitoring, threat detection and access controls to mitigate security risks and prevent data leaks. Layer IT protection by ensuring all software is up to date, multi-factor authentication is in place and staff are trained on cybersecurity compliance and best practices. Finally, with ransomware attacks and email fraud increasing among MATs at an alarming rate, ensure there is an incident response plan in place to reduce any attack’s impact.
- Centralize IT functions:
Following IT infrastructure unification through the cloud, continue with integrating and centralizing other IT functions found in HR, data, hardware and software procurement, and utilities. This will also centralize budgets, which will attract economies of scale and a more effective and efficient way of working together across academies.
- Merge your data:
When merging data, establish an action plan that rolls out again in phases, based on established needs and priorities. One of the results of the previously done data audit will be broad visibility of the entire data landscape across the MAT: from capture, collection, storage, analysing to presentation. Due to its importance, many begin systematising financial data, then move on to other areas, such as human resources and performance functions, and finally those related to academics and student data.
- Invest in collaboration tools:
Invest in MAT-wide Intranet and other collaboration tools to facilitate information sharing, document collaboration and discussion among staff and trustees. Effective communication among academies within a MAT is crucial to improving overall governance, simplifying processes, and establishing best practices and standardization across management, teaching and learning. For instance, having one shared area for teaching resources makes it easier for leadership to monitor academic planning, and assess and compare quality across departments. It will also reduce teacher workloads and increase efficiency.
- Expand your technology team:
Address the digital divide that can exist within the academies in a MAT by hiring a Technology Support Officer (TSO). Ensuring staff members, including teachers, are digitally literate and can upskill in adopting new processes and tools is crucial to the successful digital transformation of a MAT. A TSO helps bridge the digital skills gap among staff and across academies by creating training programs and workshops, troubleshooting technical issues, and making sure no staff member is left behind by fostering a digitally literate workforce.
In conclusion, the importance of aligning organizational and structural digital transformation efforts is fundamental to the overall educational strategy and success of MATs, but requires a tremendous amount of planning, effort and resources. By following some of the recommendations we have listed however, you will significantly improve a MAT’s capacity to reach the ultimate goal of this educational framework: enhanced teaching and learning while remaining competitive.
For further assistance and information on getting the right digital strategy in place for your MAT, connect with our Knowledge Exchange program today. Our Account Managers provide access to expert advice, industry insights and a network of technology partners to fit your needs.
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