Multi-academy trusts
Fourteen schools, fourteen inherited systems, and no way to answer a trustee’s question in one place.
Trust executives, estates leads and central teams
The people who have to assure something they did not specify.
A trust that has grown by conversion inherits its schools’ security along with everything else: a DVR in one, analogue in another, an unsupported system in a third, and a set of keys nobody has a register for. Each may be adequate. Collectively they cannot be assured, reported on, or supported by one contract.
The trust-level questions are different from the school-level ones. Not ‘do we have cameras’ but ‘can I tell the board that every school meets the same standard, and would I know if something happened at one of them right now’.
What a trust actually needs to solve
Inconsistent estates
Different systems, different ages, different suppliers, no common standard.
No central view
Fourteen logins, or more often fourteen phone calls.
Reporting to trustees
A termly answer that is currently assembled by email.
Procurement
One framework and one contract rather than fourteen.
New schools joining
A standard to apply from day one.
Central staff
Estates and safeguarding needing visibility without interfering.
Leavers
Removed across every site at once, not school by school.
Capital planning
Knowing what is end-of-life and when.
Support
One number, and somebody who knows all fourteen sites.
How a trust is arranged
A trust is set up as one organisation with sub-accounts. The central team sits above clusters or regions, which sit above individual schools. Each school keeps its own groups — senior leadership, safeguarding, site team, all staff — and its own documents. A central user can alert one school, a cluster, or every site at once, and can see what is happening across the trust without ringing round.
One organisation, many sites
Sites under one organisation
Each school keeps its own devices, users and administrators.
Roles that reflect the trust
Site staff see their school; central estates sees all of them; the DPO sees the audit log.
Unlimited users
Verkada licences devices, not people, which is unusually helpful across a trust.
SSO and provisioning
Entra ID or Google Workspace, so a leaver loses access when HR removes them.
How this actually goes across a trust
In our experience the technical work is the easy part.
Start with two schools — one large, one small. Prove the specification, the access model and the handover, then repeat it. A trust standard agreed after two real installations is worth far more than one agreed in a meeting beforehand.
Then phase by condition rather than by geography: the schools with failing or unsupported systems first, the adequate ones at their natural replacement point. That spreads the capital and avoids replacing things that still work.
Expect the slow parts to be governance rather than cabling: who sees what, who signs off a DPIA across the trust, and which decisions stay with heads.
What a trust board actually wants
Four things, termly, on one page.
Coverage
Which schools are on the standard and which are not yet.
Condition
What is end-of-life and when it needs capital.
Incidents
What happened, where, and what the system contributed.
Access
Who has administrative rights, reviewed and signed off.
One console, every school, one conversation with one supplier
The estates lead of a nine-school trust is not asking for better cameras. They are asking to stop holding nine different maintenance contracts, nine recorder passwords and nine versions of the truth about what is fitted.
- One login covers the estate. Licences are per device with unlimited users, so a central team and each school office can both have access without buying seats.
- Standardise once, roll out school by school. A device schedule and a specification you can hold every future project to, instead of whatever the last local installer fitted.
- Each school is still standard tier. Schedule 1 puts education premises in the standard tier regardless of numbers, so a trust does not inherit an enhanced-tier duty by being large.
- One DPIA template, nine schools. The data-protection work is done once properly rather than nine times badly.
Questions from people in your position
Can each school still run its own site?
Can we buy it centrally and bill schools?
What about schools with recent systems?
Start with a survey, not a quotation.
We walk the site, look at what you already have, and tell you what would genuinely help — including where the answer is that you do not need anything.
Book a free site survey Call 01727 822 833Tell us about the site
Send us a few details and an engineer — not a call centre — will come back to you within one working day.
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If you are dealing with an incident now, call 999. This line is monitored during office hours.