The challenge
Before our involvement, the school had previous relied on an internal IT Manager and while this provided some continuity, it created challenges: cover during sickness and holidays was limited and all knowledge was ringfenced to a single individual. When that person left, a third-party IT consultancy stepped in, but their expertise was largely corporate-focused and didn’t fully meet the school’s needs.
Our approach
The plan was for Connect Systems to recruit, employ and manage a dedicated 1st line engineer onsite, supported by our wider engineering team. This approach ensured day-to-day issues were resolved promptly while giving the school access to our collective IT experience of over 350 years and combined the benefits of a local presence with the depth and experience of a specialist team.
During onboarding, we assumed responsibility for the network in its existing state and immediately identified several high-priority issues. These included a fault with the firewall which caused instability and a virtual machine running a critical application that was about to fall out of support. Both posed significant risks to continuity, so we prioritised their resolution.
After the initial onboarding had been completed, we engaged with the school’s leadership team to understand their pain points and objectives. We shared examples of how we support other schools and gathered ideas that helped us shape a tailored strategy. Our initial remedial work focused on improving security and stability and the first step was to replace the existing firewall with a high-availability cluster of WatchGuard devices. This replaced a single point of failure on hardware which had been causing intermittent outages. We also refreshed the edge switches and this removed bottlenecks in throughput and futureproofed the network with enterprise-grade hardware and centralised management. This upgrade also simplified the deployment of VLANs, enabling us to enhance both security and performance simultaneously.
After completion of the summer upgrades, the school’s dedicated account management team started the development of a dynamic three-year IT roadmap in close collaboration with the school. This plan outlined phased improvements across the entire infrastructure, covering everything from backup and security to cloud services, Microsoft 365 to the classroom environment. By providing a clear and strategic direction, this document gives the school confidence in its future planning and reassures governors that the development of the IT is structured, proactive and well-defined.
The outcome
Through collaboration and ongoing engagement, we’ve helped Manor Prep transform its IT environment. What began as reactive fixes has evolved into a proactive, strategic partnership that continues to deliver value.
“The support and strategic guidance we’ve received has been game-changing. IT is now planned for and taken care of — we can now focus on delivering outstanding education.” – School Administrator
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