Your new company
This is a large and ambitious multi-academy trust with a strong presence across the North of England, serving thousands of pupils across a diverse family of schools. Committed to delivering exceptional educational outcomes, the trust places collaboration, inclusion and continuous improvement at the heart of everything it does. The organisation has invested significantly in its central services and technology functions, recognising the important role digital innovation plays in supporting both teaching and operational excellence. As the trust continues to evolve, it offers the opportunity to join a forward-thinking environment where technology is viewed as a strategic enabler rather than simply a support function. Employees benefit from working alongside experienced professionals, contributing to meaningful projects, and helping to shape services that have a direct impact on schools, staff and learners across a large and varied educational estate.Your new role
As IT Manager at this North Manchester site, you will take a leading role in supporting and developing the academy's IT environment, ensuring pupils and staff have access to reliable, secure and innovative technology. Combining hands-on technical support with network management responsibilities, you will be responsible for maintaining critical infrastructure, troubleshooting complex technical issues and driving the adoption of cloud-based technologies across the academy. Working closely with teaching and support staff, you will help maximise the impact of technology on teaching, learning and operational efficiency. You will oversee the academy's network performance, cloud platforms and day-to-day IT operations, whilst acting as a key escalation point for technical issues. Alongside maintaining servers, connectivity and end-user devices, you will also manage service desk tickets, support ongoing improvement projects and provide guidance and mentoring to junior members of the IT team. This is an excellent opportunity for an experienced IT professional from the education sector looking to take ownership of a varied technical environment and play a key role in delivering a cloud-first strategy within a large educational organisation.Key Duties & Responsibilities:
- Lead the delivery of advanced IT support across hardware, software, cloud services and network infrastructure.
- Manage and maintain network performance, connectivity, security and reliability across the academy.
- Act as a champion for cloud technologies, supporting the organisation's cloud-first approach and adoption of platforms such as Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace.
- Diagnose and resolve complex technical issues, ensuring incidents are managed within agreed service levels.
- Configure, deploy and support a wide range of end-user devices, classroom technology and specialist IT equipment.
- Manage IT asset inventories, system maintenance schedules, backups and security procedures.
- Support procurement activities and contribute to continual service improvement initiatives.
- Mentor and support junior IT colleagues, helping to develop technical capability across the team.
What you'll need to succeed
In order to be successful in securing this role, you will have experience providing IT support in an educational setting, where you have provided a high level of IT service to pupils and staff. You will ideally have a strong working knowledge of Google, as well as experience working with bespoke educational technologies. To succeed in this role, a proactive approach and strong communication skills are required, as well as a passion for delivering an excellent IT service in a busy working environment.
What you'll get in return
You will be joining an already well-established trust of over 40 schools, with further growth planned, therefore offering career development and further growth opportunities. You will join a central IT team of over 40 specialists, where you will be fully supported upon joining the trust, as well as being offered CPD and additional training opportunities. The salary for this role is between £38,000 and £41,700 dependent on experience, and also comes with an excellent benefits offering. This includes 31 days holiday (plus bank), access to a local government pension scheme, discounted gym membership and also retail discounts.
What you need to do now
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