The ‘Alumnis Multi Academy Trust’ consists of seven primary schools and a main administrative hub in North Devon. In forming their Trust, they built upon an already successful partnership between the founding schools, including a teaching school, in order to continue working together to improve outcomes for their pupils, invest in their staff and stay true to their vision and values. As a MAT made up of both church and community schools, they are inclusive and innovative and value working with like-minded partners in order to achieve the best for the children in their care.
The Challenge
Communication is essential to deliver their vision. The biggest challenge of managing eight sites throughout rural North Devon is enabling staff to work effectively as a team throughout the trust. With the faculty striving to provide a uniform experience to all parents on all sites, the trust needed to effectively move telephone calls between schools with a solution that was easy to use and easy to manage.
The Cobalt team were responsive and pro-active during all parts of the project, from the point of receiving our enquiry, to working collaboratively with the Alumnis team to build the solution, and throughout the post-installation support and training. Our system was installed in August 2019, and by mid-September colleagues across the Alumnis Multi Academy Trust were feeding back that the auto-attend system was proving efficient and effective, whilst the internal calling facility has radically reduced our external calls volume, which is cost-effective.
Rose Colpus-Fricker, Trust Business Manager
The Solution
By working closely with both the Trust and their IT partners, we provided a new 3CX telephone system. The Trust did not want to have to rely on a single site to host the system so the whole installation is hosted on Amazon Web Services.
Their team use standard desk phones and, as all schools are now part of the same telephone system, they can call any colleague on any site by simply dialling an extension number.
A Little Extra
The hosted system allowed for easy growth as additional extensions could be added at a low cost,
one user at a time. This made it easy to budget
for future growth.