Red Kite Learning Trust reduces their telecoms costs by over £100K
The Red Kite Learning Trust is a multi-academy trust made up of 14 schools in North and West Yorkshire, serving more than 9,750 children and young people and their families, from nursery to sixth form.
The challenge
Red Kite Learning Trust faced a very typical challenge for multi-site academies, inheriting ageing technology with each site running independently of the other. The Trust consists of nine primary and three secondary schools and one through-school across Yorkshire.
Each school within the Trust was running independent systems from different providers, with varying agreements and renewal dates, as a result, the telecoms estate was becoming increasingly difficult to manage. Taking a more strategic approach the Trust was keen to consolidate its telecoms through one central provider to implement a future-proof telephony platform.
With plans for continued growth, seamless connectivity between sites was a high priority. As was the potential for the system to grow alongside them. But ultimately they needed to be confident that being offline was no longer a possibility.
The solution
Through a successful tender process, CloudClevr, through its NGC Networks Limited business unit, was awarded Crawshaw Academy in Pudsey as the first school to deploy an Avaya IP500 Telephony Server solution into the Trust.
The Avaya telephony solution is hosted on the Trust’s own data centre connected with MPLS data technology to provide a highly secure and resilient solution. If an error occurred onsite the solution would default to the MPLS connection to access the schools’ network. This solution was then rolled out to the remaining schools within the Trust in a phased manner.
The new telephony solution includes 1st and 2nd line support, provided by an experienced in-house technical team from CloudClevr.
As part of the overhaul of the Trust’s telecoms, CloudClevr mobile team also provided a competitive O2 coterminous agreement for the staff. The contracts are on a flexible share tariff which means the schools share a pool of data to avoid any unnecessary overspending.
The results
Costs have been significantly reduced with free calls between sites and UK landlines and mobile calls. In total, over £100K of savings will be achieved across the Trust over the five-year agreement.
Red Kite now benefits from a standardised telephony solution across all sites. The solution is straightforward to manage and can scale alongside the Trust.
The new features of the technology facilitate remote, cross-site and agile working. Staff can make and receive calls across sites and remotely via mobile apps, which are integrated into the telephony platform.
Safeguarding functionality is now available in the classrooms, in an emergency, they can broadcast messages throughout the school from a central location.
A singular, centralised platform provides simplicity and standardisation. The day-to-day management of the network is now far easier, with a single point of contact and central billing for all schools across the Trust.
Modern software-based technology supplies a futureproof system for the Trust, which is resilient, secure, easy to upgrade and provides failover and backup in case of emergency.
