Cluster Technical Lead

Cluster Technical Lead

Location: Salford

Salary: £36,000 - £40,000 per annum, DOE

Contract Type: Full time, 52 weeks, 37.5 hours per week

Closing Date: Friday, 29th October 2021 at midday

Interviews: TBC

The role

We are looking to recruit to a new exciting position within an established IT service team as Cluster Technical Lead. The role will involve working as part of large team of technical support staff across multiple schools and academies in the Greater Manchester region that are part of the United Learning Multi-Academy Trust.

About You

We are looking for a highly adaptable, knowledgeable, and technical candidate with the ability to solve complex problems and support in the upkeep and running of back-end infrastructure.  Ideally you will be currently working in a school environment or similar context, in an IT Support role and are looking for the next step in your career. This is a field-based role which supports schools’ local IT staff with technology projects and problem solving. Some key responsibilities include:

Helping support local IT with technically challenging issues or medium-scale projects, including their procurement.

Working with Service Managers to carry out technical audits of key systems and processes, to identify threats to a school’s effective operations and resolving areas of concern.

Providing Level 2 / 3 escalation support to local IT.

Supporting and challenging local IT and school management to implement any necessary changes to address identified problems.

Providing input to IT estate refresh planning, allowing the school to budget to sustain a highly effective technology infrastructure.

Giving advice and training to local IT staff, to develop the school’s capacity.

Offering additional short-term expert capacity in times of crisis.

The candidate will need to demonstrate a strong knowledge of server management, network device configuration as well as experience of supporting users within a Microsoft Windows environment. Knowledge, experience and the ability to trouble-shoot and resolve a spectrum of second/third line issues ranging from hardware through to software is required.  The role includes some line management of staff ensuring they are performing and delivering an effective service to support teaching and learning.  The post holder will also work to ensure the service resolves issues within the SLAs agreed upon with the school.

United Learning is currently the largest academy sponsor in England with over 90 schools. Our ethos is the best in everyone and as a group, we aim to provide a life changing education to all children and young people throughout the country. The Greater Manchester IT service is made up of 11 academies that provides support to over 8,500 users across wide ranging and diverse communities.

 

The position is full time (37.5 hours per week), all year round.  Although the role has predominantly fixed working hours, it may involve, where the business requires, both evening and weekend work. The role holder will therefore need to demonstrate a degree of flexibility and willingness to work unsociable hours if called upon.  It is expected that the post holder will adapt their working hours around the business needs of the academy and IT service.  The post comes with 25 days holiday entitlement in addition to Bank Holidays and the successful candidate will be enrolled automatically into the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) run by Greater Manchester Pension Fund (GMPF).

 

Benefits - Employees of United Learning are offered employee benefits through its reward scheme, United Rewards.  United Learning has teamed up with Perkbox to offer employees over 250 exclusive benefits, all through their easy-to-access platform and mobile app.  Featuring a huge range of perks, from discounted cinema tickets and holidays, to money off meals out at restaurants and savings on food, technology and clothes shopping. They also offer salary sacrifice schemes such as 25% off gym membership and Cycle to Work - which offer tax and NI savings on new bikes. 

United Learning

Salford City Academy is part of United Learning, a large, and growing, group of schools aiming to offer a life changing education to children and young people across England.

Our schools work as a team and achieve more by sharing than any single school could. Our subject specialists, our Group-wide intranet, our own curriculum and our online learning portal all help us share knowledge and resource, helping to simplify work processes and manage workloads for an improved work-life balance.

As a Group, we can reward our staff better: with good career opportunities, better pay, benefits, and ultimately, the satisfaction of helping children to succeed. We invest in our staff wellbeing. Our academies each have at least eight INSET days per year (with three of those solely dedicated to planning), and an ongoing group-wide wellbeing programme. It's an ethos we call ‘the best in everyone’.