Academies Enterprise Trust claims £1.5m savings with cloud administration system

Progresso management information system will centralise administration for academies chain

The Academies Enterprise Trust, which runs 66 primary and secondary schools across the UK, claims that it will save £1.5m by implementing a cloud-based administration system.

The Trust is implementing Progresso from Advanced, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud-based system in order to centralise its schools' administration systems.

The package takes a "learner-centric approach", which "places 'progress and attainment' of the individual at the core of the solution, linking and using all key data, with a single view of the 'learner'", according to Advanced.

The aim of the implementation is not just to reduce IT administration costs, but to reduce costs more generally, while empowering teachers to populate the system with learning information directly in the classroom.

Chris Meaney, ICT director at the Trust, admitted that one of the primary aims of the implementation was to unite the localised systems that each school is currently running on, and to give teaching and administrative staff easier access to systems.

"Our senior leaders and teachers will be able to access important data to gain a real-time view of learner progress - at the trust, academy, cohort or learner level - facilitating an efficient and rapid response to any immediate issues identified, and fast dissemination of positive best practices.

"In short, this software will empower our academies and staff to positively impact outcomes, in an instant," claimed Meaney.

The SaaS system from Advanced was selected following a market test, he added, with the choice based partly on the customisability of the package.

"In addition, its learner-centric approach enables staff to access relevant data-driven dashboards and widgets, at any time and on any device. This not only helps to improve outcomes by facilitating informed decision-making, but also reduce teacher workload," he said.

As part of the implementation, Advanced will conduct a data migration from the disparate systems currently running at the Trust's 66 sites across the UK in order to populate the new system.

Nick Wilson, managing director of public sector and enterprise at Advanced, suggested that the regulatory landscape for schools in the UK would only make schools administration more challenging.

"With the regulatory landscape of Ofsted becoming increasingly more complex, Academies Enterprise Trust needed to be much more proactive in improving learner progress with transparency and insight.

"This implementation will enable leaders and teachers to access real-time data, ensuring learner-centricity is at the heart of what they do while remaining agile enough to respond with speed and accuracy," said Wilson.

Computing's Enterprise Security & Risk Management Summit returns on 24 November. Entrance is FREE to qualifying IT leaders and computing professionals, but places are going fast, so register now.