Centralised Tech Solution To Enable Severn Academies Educational Trust To Engage Teams Across Seven Schools

@SevernAcademies Educational Trust (SAET) has agreed a new technology partnership to deliver comprehensive financial efficiencies and improve employee engagement for 470 staff across its trust.

The Worcestershire-based multi-academy trust, comprising five primary schools and two secondary schools, will implement a full range of finance, HR and payroll products from leading education software provider, Access

Using the new platform, SAET plans to introduce new measures to assess, understand and boost engagement as it continues to develop the best teaching standards across the trust.

Tim Morton, IT director at SAET, explained what the partnership with Access meant for the trust. He said:

“As part of our strategic growth, we wanted to do more at a central level. We know this will help to reduce the admin burden on our schools and give them more time to focus on supporting staff and delivering great education to the pupils.

“There’s a big difference between a single school and a MAT which has to deal with distribution across multiple sites. You need a really well integrated system in order to do that. As a fully integrated SaaS solution, Access Education will enable us to draw everything together in a single point and then create things like dashboards which can be tailored to the individual or team.”

Alison Powell, head of HR at SAET, added:

“We were previously (and primarily) using a combination of spreadsheets and manual processes. Having lots of processes across different systems can increase workload and create a whole host of challenges, so being able to automate workflows centrally will have a huge impact across the trust.

“Most importantly, the partnership with Access Education will give us the opportunity to measure and increase employee engagement. Being able to offer more proactive support to staff is vital for the trust to continue to be a great place to work and deliver outstanding education to pupils.”

Simon Baines, managing director of The Access Group’s Education business explained that he was looking forward to creating a strong partnership with SAET. He said:

“We’re delighted to start working with such a well-respected MAT with great plans for growth. The comprehensive solution we will be delivering to SAET will make the operation more efficient and allow the whole trust to spend more time on its core focus of delivering outstanding education in its schools.”