Flourish Academy Trust

Among our clients is Flourish Academy Trust, the largest Special Educational Needs (SEN) academy in Europe. It has an international reputation for expertise, curriculum and training, is rated as ‘Outstanding’ by Ofsted and is a National Teaching School. In addition to taking care of the day-to-day help desk services for their 500 users, our role providing schools IT support services included ensuring all infrastructure was reliable and secure. As part of a fully managed service, we have multiple people at their schools, on site, every day.

Challenge and Solution

Intersys and Flourish Academy Trust worked together to develop a comprehensive long-term IT strategy. Like many schools, they were working with ageing and outdated infrastructure. Their network was a particular problem, and with multiple premises, there were issues regarding connectivity between the sites. There was also a requirement for more robust security. We needed to ensure their IT services were streamlined so that improvements and ongoing support were cost-effective. We also needed to leverage our hardware partners supplying school laptops as well as desktop and tablet devices, to ensure we could find suitable equipment, bearing in mind budgetary concerns.

Special project

We worked with Flourish to develop SENtinel, an award-winning curriculum tracking solution for SEN schools. It enables schools to gauge and demonstrate SEN pupil progress for internal and external inspections. SENtinel helped Flourish Academy achieve an ‘Outstanding’ rating by Ofsted in December 2017. Intersys won the Government/Utilities Solution of the Year at the IT Europa Awards 2018 for SENtinel.