A brief history

Batley Grammar School was founded in 1612 and celebrated its quarter centenary in 2012, after having becoming a free school in 2011. The school pride themselves on giving focused attention to students and are committed to encouraging every student to make their own positive contribution to success both in and out of the classroom.

We headed over to see them recently, to learn more about their experiences working with our team at Dynamic Networks. Here's what they had to say...

Why did you need to outsource your IT?

Before working with Dynamic, we had one single IT Manager who oversaw all of the IT for the school. Just recently, we have developed a five year strategic forecast which has involved increasing the schools capacity. The number of students was to increase from 600 to 1000. We came to the conclusion that one IT Manager would struggle to cope with the increase in capacity and demand. Rather than appoint a second person, we bought in Dynamic in to support the school in its growth.

Why did you choose Dynamic?

The decision was between 3 companies. After receiving proposals from all 3 companies, we concluded that Dynamic had the sufficient level of expertise required and provided the most economic advantage for price and quality. School funding has been reduced year on year over the last 6-7 years, so we are having to do more with less money. This is the underlying reason we are having to find good quality suppliers for a good price. In the future we are wanting to embrace web based technology and Dynamic were the perfect company to help us achieve our long term goals.

Have you found working with a Technical Account Manager as opposed to a traditional Sales person?

Mo has also added lots of extra value by suggesting ways of increasing our productivity. When we first engaged with him, he suggested doing a physical audit and gave his professional judgement on our vulnerabilities. From the back of this, he set a road map in place and in turn a project to migrate to new virtual machines. This meant that we were able to reuse the hardware that we already had, just upgrading the parts and redeployed the old hardware so we got great value from this. This was great economic use of old kit and I was impressed by how honest Mo was during this process as he could have just suggested that we buy loads of new machines! I could tell that this wasn’t a sales driven initiative and that he did really want to help us.

In a few words Paul, can you tell us how your overall experience has been working with Dynamic?

I am very pleased with the work that Dynamic has done for us so far and would strongly recommend them to any schools within the second year education sector. I think there are a lot of schools in this area that rely heavily on one IT manager who in most cases has a very narrow tacit knowledge base, using a company like Dynamic gives everyone at peace of mind that their IT is being dealt with safely and professionally with the expertise required.