In February I was feeling good. I had the time to work on digital strategies refreshes for customers and our own MATs. My focus was to usher in a change in mindset for schools. Many were finding themselves having to replace equipment after years of tough budgets – but too Read more
I’ve been tweeting a lot last night and this morning especially about why Zoom is crap, and why I can’t understand those people or schools using it when they have GSuite and Office365 just sat there. But then I realised I can understand it after getting many many replies. When Read more
I still can’t believe, that in a matter of less then 2 weeks, schools have fully adopted Office365, devices have been bought and rolled out via Intune and azure, software has been purchased to increase adoption in schools and I’ve delivered training consecutively to full rooms. It only took a Read more
I’ve always avoided using the term managed service to describe what we do at Lourdes IT – lots of directly employed Edu IT staff see it as a horrific term that means they will loose their jobs and autonomy. The thing is, they are right to an extent. Those things Read more
It’s been a busy few months at work, I mean, when is it not. But in the last year, Lourdes IT, the team I lead, has more then doubled in size and in the schools we support. This rapid growth has been rewarding, and challenging. With more people and more Read more
Right now there is a serious recruitment problem for IT support in Schools. There is simply not the people with the skills and the experience going into schools, because the wages are so low, the expectations and demands are so (often unreasonably) high. Support staff, in whatever capacity, are often Read more
The role of IT Support teams in schools have changed significantly – in many academies and trusts they are being seen as something that can create an income or spread influence by the powers that be. The workload is increasing and, as centralisation takes hold, the day to day nature Read more
2018 was an interesting year for myself and Lourdes IT, as we settled into the role of being not aligned to a particular school, and being managed centrally within the academy company. I have also taken a more strategic role within another MAT as well as our own. Our biggest Read more
In April 2012, 3 months before my daughter was born I took a leap. I was running my own business, and had an offer on the table to fund myself for a year to offer schools IT support, from a friend who was the leading networking expert in Worcestershire. I Read more
We launched with our freshdesk helpdesk in April, so where I have had the time this summer, I have been looking into how it has performed, and things that we can do better. Overall, the feedback from users and from technicians, in particular, has been great. The technician side, the Read more