Chesterfield High School

“Dataspire lives up to and often exceeds, our expectations as the service improves week by week. We wanted to be able to put our trust in an organisation that could look after our needs without us having to overly invest too much time. Dataspire has done that so far and I’m looking forward to progressing onto new developments that we can make to improve outcomes across the school.” 

Jon Duffy, Director of IT and Business Studies

About Chesterfield High School

Chesterfield High School in Crosby, Merseyside, provides a community of learning to circa. 1,200 students in years 7–13. Their mission is to encourage a culture where every student has the opportunity to reach their full potential through lessons that are academically challenging and engaging.

From Year 7 through to Sixth Form, Chesterfield High delivers:

• an extra-curricular provision that is exciting and presents diverse opportunities for all, especially in the arts and sport
• strong GCSE results that are consistently above the national average and therefore, one of the top-performing schools in Sefton
• a successfully delivered, and wide range of academic and vocational subjects at A-Level with improving academic success
• high rates of university entrance, with increasing numbers of students attending Russell Group Universities.

About Dataspire Solutions

Dataspire Solutions is an Education Technology (EdTech) company that provides a host of IT services and support to schools and academies across the country – helping to create confidence in the use of technology and to improve outcomes for children and young people

While for over 15 years, Dataspire has primarily helped schools and academies with their technology, its ethos has always been led by education and the personnel that deliver it, and as a result, Dataspire staff fully understand, react and respond to schools’ operational priorities in a manner that is the most appropriate and the most effective.

Our services include:

The Challenge

Chesterfield High School previously employed an IT support service that provided limited experience, expertise and most importantly, information to their school colleagues. The team at the time would hire external third parties to diagnose issues and often left the school without a solution.

The school would experience frequent outages which were not communicated, and the Chesterfield High staff would only learn of the issues when logging onto the network each morning. This, of course, meant downtime during lessons and general disturbance to the school day including business admin tasks being disrupted, such as morning registration and simply knowing who was onsite. The school was therefore unable to trust the reliability of the network.

In need of a new support service, the school went out to tender and having reviewed several companies, began liaising with a Dataspire Account Manager who provided a package that included implementation and support.

“We went through a best value procurement process, looked at the range of suppliers and did our homework – including speaking with other schools for reference. 

“Dataspire arrived, identified the problems and developed a plan to remove the issues, managing the process from start to finish. They installed and implemented a new Network and Switch solution for our school which made our network more robust and reliable.  

“Following this improvement, we then wanted to work with them to create a proactive management solution that allowed us to have software on the network that would proactively alert us if there were any issues before we arrived at school. Whether it was 1am or later that day, the proactive monitoring solution enabled us to know what we had in store as it connected to the Dataspire Remote Service Desk, which meant it could be rectified in advance and remove any headache across the day.”

Why Dataspire Solutions?

Before the Dataspire Managed Service, the IT support at Chesterfield High School was disjointed and much of the support was delivered by teaching and learning staff. The school identified the need for an IT company that could come in and take ownership, rather than school staff having to oversee and line manage onsite technicians.

“Dataspire provide a complete package from account management to project management, right through to service relationship management to understand and steer the technicians onsite. From experience, we knew we wanted a Managed IT Service that could, and would, manage the service while providing support and advice on how to take our ICT plans to the next step. 

“It’s good to know that Dataspire is there to go back to and put my trust in, and with my account manager’s help, I can source the best EdTech products at the best prices. 

 “Having seen how they had delivered on previous projects there was a kind of pre-qualification on their ways of working before the contract was up for negotiation. The full personnel infrastructure that sits behind Dataspire, means that you are always covered and we particularly liked having access to a project manager to lead on any IT projects and take ownership off the school by putting it into their hands.”

What part of the service have you found the most helpful?

The school recognised that a key solution that comes with the Dataspire Managed Service is the Remote Service Desk, as all onsite technicians have access to an online portal that allows them to see any tickets that have been raised in school and the portal is measured with KPIs so it keeps everyone on track.

“There is a lot of data that can be seen via the remote service desk and so it was also used as a motivator to get jobs completed. It also provides a central point of communication for our school, so rather than staff around the school sending untracked emails for support to other colleagues, they now know that it has been logged on the service desk and doesn’t have just one set of eyes looking at it. It reassures us that we are being looked after. 

“More than anything, we value the management of processes because it makes a massive difference to the school. Also the flexibility, particularly with the impact of Covid. The Dataspire team were happy to work alongside us in the way that we needed them to, in terms of being onsite (or not) and wearing PPE to make sure everyone was safe. Dataspire has made it easy (along with best value) to choose them for our Managed IT Service and other subsequent contracts.”

And the results…

The staff at Chesterfield High School are now more confident as they can trust the IT network to remain available while they teach and beyond. They can also rely on the IT support received, to prevent and fix any issues they may encounter in a timely fashion without it impacting teaching and learning.

“For us, efficiency has been the main thing. Issues aren’t overlooked or forgotten and with the remote service desk, we can see if there have been any repeat issues that are affecting the whole school. 

“We’re also more confident in the level of support that we will receive which we didn’t have before. Previously, a lot of time has been spent trying to find answers and solutions but now we don’t have to as we have experts onsite who are proactively monitoring and managing all issues. It has empowered our staff to know that the support is there at any point.”

The Dataspire Promise

• We will work closely with you to understand your needs.
• We will provide best value on our services and solutions, to ensure you get the most from your investment in technology
• We will help you to deliver your ICT Vision, now and into the future.
• We will provide reliable support that you can trust.