Struggling to make the case for IT investment in your school, college, or university?

In terms of IT, the education sector is facing a quiet crisis. Aging infrastructure, shrinking budgets, and escalating Government requirements are colliding in ways that leave education establishments caught between compliance and survival. To understand the full picture (and what can actually be done about it) I sat down with Ciaran, a Hybrid Infrastructure Solutions Expert who has spent a good deal of his career in the Education sector, working his way up from apprentice to engineer and strategist at a managed service provider serving Education Establishments across the UK.

He now brings that hard-won expertise to a broader market. What follows is an honest, practical, and at times eye-opening conversation about the state of IT in Education.

It would be very easy to pin it all on dwindling budgets, and whilst the reality is that budgets are getting smaller, it's not the whole story. Requirements and guidelines from entities like the Department for Education (DfE) and National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) are ramping up all the time, and there's a real disconnect between the two.

The challenge I see most often is (not surprisingly) ageing infrastructure. If an Education Establishment was built ten years ago, they'll have received an initial chunk of funding and installed all their switches, servers, and basically their entire IT ecosystem. But what often doesn't happen is any kind of internal strategic planning for what comes next, over three, five, or ten years. So, you get to a point where all of that infrastructure is ageing, and it's reaching end-of-life and end-of-support all at the same time. It's then very tricky to go to an Education Establishment and say, "You need to replace X, Y, and Z all at once" because they'll turn around and say, "That's not really possible, we don't have the budget for that."

It's the perfect storm, ageing infrastructure, very tight budgets, and a lack of internal strategic thinking around IT. Senior leaders in education do a fantastic job, but their focus is Education, which is as it should be, they're busy educating young minds. But they don't always have that technical strategic overview. They've not typically got a roadmap in place and that's where Bechtle come in.

There’s definitely tension between compliance and affordability. The DfE guidelines are quite forward-looking, for example recommending Cat6A for new cabling and OM4 fibre backbones, which can be a significant investment for schools that haven’t been upgrading incrementally.

Another example is on the server and storage side, where the DfE guidance emphasises resilience and avoiding single points of failure for critical systems. In practice, that often points towards highly available or redundant designs, but many Education Establishments aren’t in a position to invest in the additional hardware and licensing required to achieve full resilience across the board. As a result, it becomes about finding the right balance and taking a strategic approach, for example, moving less frequently accessed data to the cloud to reduce on-premises demands, which can then allow for more resilient configurations and better protection of core systems.

My approach to bridging the gap starts with acknowledgement. We developed documents and templates to put together a full strategy review, breaking the entire ecosystem down into sections. Core network, switching, cabling, servers, storage, wireless, all linked directly to the DfE guidelines.

• Step one is recording exactly what they currently have.
• Step two is comparing that to DfE guidance.
• Step three is RAG rating it (red, amber, green) so leadership can visually see their priorities at a glance. Anything red is priority to resolve.
• Step four is putting together a technology roadmap.

But critically, throughout all of this, we explain the DfE's technical jargon in real-world terms and always link it back to the impact on teaching, learning, and safeguarding.

Those are the things Education Establishments care about. The juggling act is giving them all the information they need without scaring them to the point they bury their heads in the sand, and constructively planning a way forward together.

It all comes back to that RAG framework. I look at the server and storage setup and start by determining what each one is running, and then prioritising what is genuinely critical.

A big one is the MIS, that’s the Management Information System. Systems like SIMS are used for student registers, emergency contacts, safeguarding records. These are absolutely critical for an Education Establishment. The problem is that SIMS, which is still the market leader, requires an SQL Server running on-premises. It's been around for years, I actually remember my teachers taking registers with SIMS when I was 11. There are cloud-based alternatives now (Bromcom, Arbor, Integris) and they're good, but they're still relatively new compared to SIMS, which has been embedded in the ecosystem for decades. The upshot is that the on-premises dependency is still very real, and that places limits on how far towards the cloud many Education Establishments can actually move.

Once we know what's running and what's critical, the conversation becomes, can we consolidate? Can we get better performance out of what they already have, as cost-effectively as possible? I would sit with senior leaders and guide them through those decisions.

And there's a broader issue here that I feel strongly about, I believe education is being let down by a select few software providers who have held significant market share and simply haven't reinvested enough in Research and Development. When you've had that kind of position for that long, you owe it to your customers to move with the times, especially when those customers are under enormous financial pressure. There needs to be more innovation, and a real pivot towards OpEx (subscription-based models) rather than forcing educators into massive capital expenditure to keep legacy software alive. Every pound spent on a "beefy server" to prop up an outdated system is a pound that could have gone to frontline services.

Think about patch management alone, a subscription-based, manufacturer-managed service that is constantly monitored and updated is absolutely invaluable to an Education Establishment that can't afford a technician on site regularly, manually patching systems to ensure security and continued functionality.

There are lots of considerations, and I'd say the first thing to acknowledge is that it's not purely a technology decision, it's a cultural and financial one too.

On the infrastructure side, if you're running a cloud platform, you're accessing it over the internet. Not all Education Establishments have fast, reliable internet connections and moving to a cloud-first model on that foundation is just going to fall flat. You also need solid wireless coverage throughout the building. If you're using Google Classroom or collaborating on Microsoft 365, teachers and students are doing that on laptops or Chromebooks over Wi-Fi and if the wireless isn't robust, it doesn't matter how good the cloud platform is.

Then there's data sovereignty and compliance. Lots of platforms market themselves to teachers and on the surface they look great, but when you do a proper Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA), you start to see what data is being stored, where it's being processed, and whether that creates GDPR exposure. This is exactly where having a strategic adviser matters enormously, especially for smaller Schools that don't have a dedicated data protection officer with the technical depth to interrogate these things.

And then there's culture change, which is probably the most underestimated factor of all. Learning new systems when you have a very busy day job (when you've got an enthusiastic group of Year 10s until 3:30) is genuinely hard. It's not enough to just provide the system. You need to invest in training and make sure people actually feel confident using it. If you don't get that right, you won't get uptake, and if people aren't using the new system, it was a complete waste of time and money.

Financially, it's critical that you provide a solution that's right for now but also has enough headroom for natural growth and any unexpected changes, maybe an educator starts using a new application, or needs to spin up additional virtual machines. You need to have that scalability built in from the start.

My approach is, don't buy cheap now and end up buying again in two years. Get it right once, and it will last you a full refresh cycle. That also keeps your budget conversations much cleaner, Local Authorities and budget holders are going to ask questions if you come back requesting more funding for something you bought eighteen months ago. Accurate, forward-looking budgeting protects you from those conversations.

The other thing I love about this approach is what it enables. If you've planned ahead and built capacity, when a new technology comes along (something that could genuinely improve teaching and learning) you're ready to adopt it straight away. Other Education Establishments that didn't plan ahead won't be. That's a real competitive advantage in Education, and it all comes back to giving students the best possible opportunities.

The biggest shift has been from purely infrastructure-focused IT to enabling digital learning experiences. Cloud platforms have evolved enormously, and what makes them so powerful is that they're not just accessible from within an Education Establishment, students can engage with their learning from anywhere.

A lot of educators are now driving cloud-based learning and 1-to-1 device schemes, where students are given a Chromebook or an iPad so they can access online learning at home, often at subsidised costs spread across a number of years to reduce financial impact to families. I've seen the impact of this in more underserved communities, and it genuinely levels the playing field, it gives every student a chance, which is exactly what education should be about.

COVID really accelerated all of this. Learning could actually continue through lockdowns because the infrastructure was there. Since then, there's been much greater acceptance of platforms like Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, and there's no going back.

But I do think the IT industry could do more. Manufacturers could do more to subsidise device access. ISPs could do more to help families who can't afford a fast/reliable broadband connection, because if a student can't get online at home, that is a direct barrier to learning. The more access to learning a young person has, the greater the return on investment for society down the line, and honestly, it's also very good PR for any Education Establishment willing to step up.

Servers and storage are often overlooked in security discussions, and they really shouldn't be, a vulnerability in your infrastructure is a vulnerability everywhere.

The fundamentals matter enormously here, can your servers run up-to-date operating systems? Can they be properly patched? If the answer is no, if you've got servers running end-of-life operating systems because the budget hasn't been there to replace them, then you have open backdoors that a malicious actor could exploit. Ransomware is a very real and growing threat in Education, and Education Establishments are targets.

The stakes are particularly high because of the nature of the data Education Establishments hold. Take SIMS as an example, a College might have fifteen years' worth of sensitive student data sitting on an unpatched server. If that's compromised, it's not just a financial and operational disaster (Education Establishments simply cannot function without access to their data) it's a safeguarding concern. That's the language that gets traction in leadership meetings, and rightly so.

I always push for encryption at rest, secure and tested backup solutions, and a disciplined approach to patching, and again, this is where subscription-based managed services are so valuable, the responsibility for keeping systems secure and up to date sits with the manufacturer, not a small School that can't afford regular technical support.

There are a few questions I work through.

Firstly, can it run up-to-date operating systems and be properly patched? If yes, the security risk is more manageable and it's lower down the priority list.

Second, is it affecting teaching and learning? Even if something is technically up to date and patched, if it's running so slowly that teachers can't access the resources they need to deliver the curriculum, that's a problem worth addressing.

Third, is the hardware still supported by the vendor or covered by third-party support? Without support, you're potentially exposed.

If the issue is performance rather than obsolescence (if the server is running slowly simply because it's under-resourced) then upgrading the RAM or installing additional disk can extend its life significantly without the cost of a full refresh. That's often a very smart interim step.

The key is always to assess everything in the context of the full picture, not in isolation. I present a holistic overview to leadership because there are always competing voices, a science teacher passionate about a particular piece of software, a business manager focused on cost, a head teacher focused on outcomes. The roadmap cuts through all of that and presents it clearly, with the spend broken down year by year so there are no nasty surprises.

The RAG rating is the foundation. Once you've got a clear, visual picture of where the risks are, you can build a roadmap that prioritises spending in a logical sequence (year one, year two, year three) based on criticality, budget, and risk.

What I also do is produce graphs showing the budget impact of different approaches. If you plan properly and spread your investment sensibly, your spend graph stays relatively flat over time. If you're reactive (replacing things only when they fail) you get big spikes of unplanned expenditure followed by nothing, which is incredibly difficult to manage and budget for. That visual comparison is very powerful in conversations with business managers and Local Authorities.

It also builds in optionality. If unexpected funding comes in, we already know exactly what's next on the priority list, so Education Establishments can act quickly and confidently, and if there's an unexpected cost (something breaking that wasn't on the roadmap) the budgeting discipline means there's headroom to absorb it without everything else being thrown off.

You can never build a world completely free of surprises, but if you've budgeted carefully enough, you can react to surprises correctly rather than being derailed by them.

[Laughs] You've asked for one piece of advice, and in my notes for this interview I've got six bullet points, but I'll try.

Link everything back to who you're doing it for, the students, that's it.

It's very easy to go into a meeting with a head teacher or a business manager and talk about unpatched servers or end-of-life hardware. but if you lead with the technical detail, they're going to switch off, after all, they've got a School, College or University to run.

What they do care about is whether students are safe, whether teaching can happen without disruption, and whether the Institutions reputation and their responsibilities are protected.

So, when I'm talking about a server running an outdated operating system, I'm not talking about patch levels. I'm talking about, this server has fifteen years of sensitive student data on it, and if it's hit by ransomware, they can't function and you have a serious safeguarding concern on your hands. That lands very differently.

Frame every investment in terms of the opportunity it gives students to learn, to be safe, and to access resources their peers at other Education Establishments might not have. Manage the risk to students, to the School, College or University, and to everyone in the supply chain. That's what decision-makers genuinely care about.

You're not selling IT, you're not even talking about IT, you're developing young minds.