CMAT was set up six years ago to promote
outstanding education at the heart of
the communities that we live in. Nene Park
joined the Trust four years ago
(previously known as Orton Longueville School) and
since then we've had a new building and
brand new facilities to really improve
the education in this area. Within CMAT
we currently have eight schools that are
running at present (with primary all the
way through to secondary) and we've got
two new developments which are coming
online in the next couple of years in two
new towns to be built just north of
Cambridge. It's important for us that
staff can move across all of our sites
with no IT challenges. They need to be
able to take a laptop and deliver a
lesson
wherever they are within our Trust
and organisation. We have the IT
challenges to support that - from a Wi-Fi
point of view, from devices in the
classroom - but also of how do we manage the
strategic development of those devices
and how do we plan a refresh plan? How do
we know that those devices are
fit for purpose and they're doing the
job they need to do?
DNA helps us to achieve that by
understanding the specification of those
machines, how long we've had them,
managing those assets through - and truly
understanding the use of those devices.
So NetSupport DNA has really helped us at
CMAT. We know all about our assets, we
know what's on them, we know what
operating systems are on them, we know what
patches for the operating system is on
them, we know exactly what the specifications
of the computers are - and we can quickly
look in the console and see exactly what
that is.
It also helps with the power: so we
know when they're turned on, when they're
turned off - and if they're not used, they
turn themselves off. It's really helped
us and saved some money. So the remote
control tools in NetSupport DNA are
really useful for us. We're a large
academies trust and we're spread over many
sites. We have lots of LAN and WAN links
and we can use the remote control tools to
control computers from our central core,
from any of our schools, and we can even
do it from mobile devices.
It really means that our IT team
can be anywhere within the
Trust and support our users. NetSupport
DNA is a great help to us. It means that we
can empower our safeguarding teams to
look at alerts and stuff like that
themselves; the IT team don't
have to do it themselves.
The safeguarding team can look to see what
alerts are produced - what the trends are.
They can use the word clouds to see if
there's any concerns and commonly used
phrases that are appearing - and they can
use that to pick up patterns and then
deal with the situations properly.
The IT staff love NetSupport DNA. They love the
ease of it: they can easily log in with
the Active Directory and they can see
everything neatly ordered. All the
computers are synced, all the users are
synced. It's really intuitive. They
don't have to have a long drawn-out
training session; they can quickly get in,
it makes sense to them and they can find
exactly what they want.
NetSupport School has made a big difference in our
classroom. Teachers love the fact that
they can just with a few clicks actively
monitor the children, they can assess
them and use the collaborative tools to
easily provide an outstanding lesson.
They love it because it's just so easy. It's all from
one console and they can just do
everything with a few clicks.
NetSupport's support team are great. The few issues we've
had, we've rung up or sent a ticket in;
they've been great:
every issue has been resolved.
The Trust has taken over a number of
schools. And each of those schools has
had their own provision, each with
different bits of software - and
NetSupport has replaced all of those. All of the
feedback has been positive:
everyone loves the new product much
better than the old ones and it's really
improved our teaching and learning.
I would recommend NetSupport to another school or Trust.
It has already saved us money. The
IT team love it,
the safeguarding team love it. It really has
made a big difference to us.
CMAT is going to grow over the next few
years in multiple different ways. From an
education point of view, we're bringing
more primaries and secondary schools
into the Trust. But from an IT point of
view, we need to grow the IT estate to
manage those schools more effectively.
We have an extra business with primary
schools that we support that aren't part of
our Trust and we need to ensure that
that part of the business grows to support them as well.
NetSupport DNA will help us to
support the growth of CMAT by
enabling us to manage those assets more
effectively and, more importantly, help
the teacher in the classroom.