Who actually owns IT decisions in your trust?
Ask a trust board who owns IT decisions and you usually get a first name.
Sometimes it is a business manager who has picked it up over the years. Sometimes it is a head who is comfortable with technology. Often it is the provider. All of those people are doing something real, but none of it is written down anywhere, and that is the problem worth fixing this term.
Responsibility and accountability are not the same job
Your provider can be responsible for the work. They configure the filtering, they run the backups, they patch the servers. That is what you pay them for.
Accountability is different. Somebody in your organisation has to decide whether what the provider is doing is right for your schools, and answer for that decision. A supplier cannot hold that, however good they are, because they are not the one who answers to the board or to Ofsted.
“Our IT provider handles that” is where most of these conversations stop. It is worth treating it as the start of one.
What this looks like when it goes wrong
It rarely announces itself. It shows up as small things that nobody owns:
• A new platform gets bought by one school and nobody checks what data it holds.
• Filtering is set up differently across four schools in the same trust, and nobody has compared them.
• A contract auto-renews because the renewal date lived in one person’s calendar.
• Somebody leaves and takes the only working knowledge of the network with them.
None of those are technical failures. Each one is a decision nobody was accountable for. [CASE STUDY: a real anonymised example from a trust would be much stronger here.]
Three things to write down
1. A named role in the scheme of delegation
Not a person’s name — a role, so it survives them leaving. Something like: the Chief Operating Officer is accountable for digital and technology across the trust, with the IT lead responsible for delivery.
Then put a line in the scheme of delegation or the terms of reference that says so, and make sure somebody could actually show it to you.
2. Who can approve a new platform
This is the one that catches trusts out. If any member of staff can sign up for a tool and start putting pupil data into it, you have no realistic control over where that data goes.
Write down who approves a new platform, what they check before saying yes, and how staff request one. Keep it short enough that people actually use it, because a process nobody follows pushes the same behaviour underground.
3. Where the standing digital item lives
Decide which committee sees digital, how often, and what it looks at. Once a year is thin. Once a term is workable.
If it currently sits nowhere, it will only appear on the agenda after something has gone wrong, and by then you are managing an incident rather than governing.
The question to ask first
At your next meeting, ask who is accountable for digital and technology decisions, and where that is written down.
If there is a pause, or people look at each other, that is your finding. It usually means the trust has grown faster than its governance, which is a fixable problem and a fairly common one. It rarely means anybody has done a bad job.
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