Broadband, Filtering and Telephony Package

Technical Strategy

The trust's strategy is to be a cloud first, device led organisation. We hope to put a device in the hands of every child at every school in our network, removing the barriers to technology and improving the learning experience.

To deliver this vision, we will be adopting a cloud first approach to technology and services, removing our dependence on on-premises infrastructure such as directory servers, file servers, SQL servers etc... Instead, we are moving our identities, data, and device management to Microsoft Office 365. We are accomplishing this transition using Microsoft 365 A3 licenses, applied to all staff and students. The end goal is for all schools to be part of this single Microsoft tenant, providing centralised management as well as improved collaboration and communication across the trust.

All schools will be moving towards SaaS based learning platforms that can integrate with our 365 services, either directly or through 3rd party integration partners such as Wonde. The trust are in the process of outlining our recommended core suite of applications for schools for both curriculum and none curriculum requirements. We have already standardised on certain services such as Arbor for MIS, CPOMS for safeguarding, and Senso for classroom management and monitoring.

This is a 10-year strategy, due to the timeline we are working with for onboarding of new schools. As such, the trust will be in a constant transitionary state, between those schools that have moved to our model, and those that are scheduled to. As each school is onboarded, they will be migrated to our parent tenancy for identity, data, and device management. Those that are inline to be onboarded will have their own model, which could range from cloud only, hybrid, or solely on prem. This is important to any bidders as we require the solution to support multiple operating models and support ease of migration from one to another.