Is Your School IT Team Delivering Value? How to Evaluate Efficiency and Effectiveness

Is Your School IT Team Delivering Value? How to Evaluate Efficiency and Effectiveness

For schools and multi-academy trusts (MATs), the performance of your IT team isn’t just about fixing printers or resetting passwords—it’s about enabling teaching, learning and leadership through reliable, responsive and secure technology. But how can you be sure your school IT support is actually delivering value?

As education becomes increasingly dependent on digital tools, it’s more important than ever to regularly evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of your ICT operations. This means taking a strategic view—not just measuring technical output, but assessing the outcomes ICT delivers for staff, pupils and the wider organisation. For many leaders, this sits at the heart of how they approach ict in schools and wider education IT services.

Start With an ICT Services Review

A comprehensive ICT services review is the best starting point. This helps schools and MATs understand how well their current provision aligns with their educational goals. A review should consider everything from staffing levels and skills to system resilience, cybersecurity, procurement practices and user satisfaction.

Critically, it should evaluate how ICT is enabling the school’s strategic vision—whether that’s through blended learning, data-informed decision making, or smart estate management.

Benchmarking with a School ICT Audit

An independent school ICT audit goes a step further. Conducted by expert consultants, it benchmarks your current IT environment against best practice, compliance requirements, and Department for Education (DfE) expectations. This can highlight inefficiencies, security risks, and areas for investment—whether that's in upgrading infrastructure, improving asset management, or changing support models.

For MATs, an ICT audit can also uncover inconsistencies across sites and help you develop a centralised strategy for better economies of scale and service delivery.

Aligning with the New DfE IT Support Standards

In November 2025, the DfE updated its digital and technology standards to include a dedicated section on IT support standards for schools and colleges. These standards set out what your school or college should meet when planning, commissioning and reviewing IT support, whether that support is internal, external or a hybrid model. GOV.UK+1

The guidance makes clear that effective IT support is essential to:

• Help you work towards the six core digital and technology standards (broadband internet, wireless network, network switching, digital leadership and governance, filtering and monitoring, and cyber security) that all schools and colleges should meet by 2030 GOV.UK
• Maintain reliable, secure digital technology and minimise outages and cyber incidents
• Enable and deliver your digital technology strategy, rather than just reacting to issues as they arise GOV.UK

The IT support standards highlight several key expectations that schools and MATs should build into their reviews of schools ICT services and school IT support:

1. IT support must help you meet the wider digital and technology standards
   Your IT team should shape their day-to-day activities and planning around the DfE standards. Senior leaders—particularly the SLT digital lead—are expected to work closely with IT support to identify technical risks and needs, and to keep progress against the standards under regular review. GOV.UK
2. IT support should actively maintain and improve your technology in line with your digital strategy
   The standards call for robust asset and contract registers, clear understanding of what technology you have and how it is supported, and planned upgrades rather than last-minute firefighting. IT support should be monitoring networks and devices, managing cloud services, applying security patches, and ensuring critical systems and data are backed up and restorable. GOV.UK
3. IT support must be responsive and work to agreed service expectations
   The DfE expects schools to set and record clear expectations for how quickly issues will be responded to and resolved, with higher priority given to incidents affecting teaching, learning or core systems such as your MIS. IT support should offer clear support channels, track all requests in a formal system, and use this data to identify recurring problems and capacity issues. GOV.UK
4. You should review your IT support at least once a year
   An annual review, led by the SLT digital lead, should assess how well IT support helps you meet the digital and technology standards, whether it offers value for money and whether skills and capacity are sufficient. This includes reviewing external contracts, performance against any SLAs, and alignment with your digital strategy and school development plan. GOV.UK
5. Staff must get clear guidance and training on using technology
   The DfE emphasises that IT support should help provide training, documentation and self-service guidance so staff can use technology safely, securely and effectively. Without this, technology is likely to be underused or misused, and pressure on the IT team will remain high. GOV.UK

For school and MAT leaders, these IT support standards provide a ready-made framework for evaluating whether your current ICT operation is truly effective. When you next review your IT provision—or commission an ICT audit—consider how well your arrangements align with each of these expectations. This is especially important if you are working across multiple sites in a multi-academy trust and want consistency in ICT in schools, from devices and connectivity to support processes and escalation routes.

Evaluating IT Support Performance

A key part of your assessment should focus on the day-to-day performance of your school IT support. Consider:

• Are issues resolved quickly and effectively?
• Do staff and students trust the IT team to support learning?
• Is your service desk (internal or outsourced) meeting its SLAs?
• How well are incidents tracked and analysed?

Effective IT service management practices—like clear ticketing systems, regular reporting and user feedback—can drive improvements and ensure that support is proactive, not just reactive. This mirrors the DfE’s emphasis on recording all support requests, using that information to monitor demand, and planning capacity for peak periods such as exams and the start of term. GOV.UK

What Does an Efficient IT Operation Look Like?

An efficient IT operation doesn’t just minimise downtime—it actively supports better teaching, reduces waste, and provides data that school leaders can use. This means:

• Automating routine tasks to free up IT staff for strategic work
• Monitoring usage to identify underused systems or licences
• Standardising devices and software across the trust to reduce complexity
• Ensuring value for money from contracts and suppliers

Your IT team should also be feeding into wider school planning, contributing to digital strategy and advising on future needs. In many cases, this will involve working closely with external partners—such as an ICT solution company or specialist ict service provider—to supplement internal capacity in areas like cyber security, cloud platforms or strategic planning.

Rethinking the Role of the MAT IT Team

For multi-academy trusts, the MAT IT team plays a critical role in achieving consistency and economies of scale. But this doesn’t happen by default.

MAT leaders should consider whether their IT teams are structured and empowered to deliver across the trust—are they focusing too much on firefighting at individual schools, or are they driving strategic initiatives like cloud adoption, cyber readiness, digital safeguarding and ai in education?

Regular reviews, combined with clear KPIs and collaborative working, help MAT IT teams become trusted enablers of educational success, and ensure that schools ICT services are aligned with both local needs and trust-wide priorities.

Next Steps: Partnering for Improvement

If you're unsure whether your IT team is delivering maximum value, or you want to improve ICT efficiency across your school or trust, Novatia can help. Our expert consultants deliver tailored ICT services reviews, full school ICT audits, and strategic guidance that aligns IT operations with your educational priorities and the latest DfE digital and technology standards for IT support.

We support schools and MATs with independent advice, practical recommendations, and ongoing support to develop effective, future-ready IT environments that make the best use of digital learning, cloud platforms and modern school IT support.

To find out how Novatia can help you evaluate your IT support, align with the DfE’s IT support standards, and strengthen IT for schools across your trust, get in touch today: https://www.novatia.com/contact