Schools exist to support teaching and learning, but they also have bills to pay. When costs rise quietly in the background, it’s often felt in the classroom.
On the surface, running separate IT systems across different schools in a Multi-Academy Trust (MAT) may appear manageable - or even unavoidable, especially after mergers or rapid expansion. But beneath the surface, disparate systems create significant financial, operational, and safeguarding risks.
For many MATs, these hidden costs are far greater than expected.
Why disparate systems cost more than they seem
On the surface, running each school with its own tools, contracts, and configurations can feel like a practical compromise, especially for trusts that have grown through mergers or inherited legacy environments. But beneath that familiarity lies a hidden and compounding cost.
Disparate systems quietly drain budgets, absorb IT time, weaken safeguarding oversight, and slow down digital progress across the trust. What appears to be a flexible, school-by-school approach often becomes one of the biggest barriers to operational efficiency and strategic growth.
There hasn’t been a school or trust that I’ve spoken to in the last few years that is happy with the sprawl of different technologies and vendors that they are managing – only a reluctant acceptance due to a lack of better options.
Strategies to consolidate vendors and provide consistent trust-wide platforms wherever possible are now becoming the norm. If we want our IT teams managing systems across ever-growing trusts without increasing IT spending exponentially, we absolutely need to give those teams unified platforms that consolidate multiple tools into one whenever we can.
With the right tools, trusts can be managed as a single entity rather than a group of separate individuals.
1. Overlapping licences and duplicated contracts
Fragmented environments often involve multiple firewalls, filters, ISPs, SLAs, and security tools - each with its own support agreement and renewal cycle. This duplication wastes budget that could otherwise support teaching and learning.
2. Higher operational overhead and IT workload
IT teams must manage multiple platforms, each with different configurations, behaviours, and quirks. This leads to troubleshooting inefficiencies and a cycle of constant reactive work, as highlighted in our MAT IT complexity analysis.
3. Inconsistent safeguarding controls
One school may use a newer filtering solution, while another school in the same MAT is still using outdated local hardware. This inconsistency increases risk, complicates audits, and slows leadership’s ability to identify trust-wide patterns.
4. Poor visibility across the estate
Mixed systems produce mixed data. Reports don’t align, and performance varies. Leadership teams cannot easily see how the network is behaving or where investment is needed.
5. Slow and costly onboarding of new academies
Every new school inherited by the trust arrives with a different network design. This delays integration and increases the cost of initial remediation work.
6. Reduced digital confidence among teachers and pupils
Unreliable connectivity, inconsistent performance, and variable access to resources hinder learning. When tech isn’t predictable, teachers revert to manual methods, and digital progress stalls.
The safeguarding impact (the most overlooked cost)
Disparate systems make it difficult to enforce consistent safeguarding controls.
Logs differ across schools
Filters block different categories
Firewalls may not be updated consistently
Data flows are harder to track
Reporting to DSLs and leadership teams is fragmented
When safeguarding incidents occur, this lack of trust-wide oversight can significantly slow response times and complicate investigations.
MATs need to reduce the overhead in reporting time when it comes to investigating safeguarding concerns. If you need to pull reports from multiple different platforms and then manually look for overlaps, gaps, and trends in data, you increase the time it takes to act – which can have serious consequences.
Whilst you may always need to pull data from various sources, minimising the number of platforms you need to use should always be the goal. Operating trust-wide safeguarding and security platforms that all offer a consistent level of protection should also help to alleviate risk from the front-line.
The link between hidden costs and network architecture
Almost every hidden cost comes back to one root cause: When the network is fragmented, everything built on top of it becomes fragmented too.
MATs with legacy WAN links or inconsistent firewalls often face:
Unpredictable cloud performance
Slower internet during peak hours
Higher vulnerability to cyber threats
Difficulty supporting AI and digital tools
More downtime and classroom disruption
The cracks don’t always show immediately, but they always show eventually.
As schools consolidate into ever-growing trusts, it causes no end of headaches for already over-worked networking teams.
You’ll have your IT team managing multiple different platforms across schools, with these schools all having their own unique mix of vendor technologies, each with their own set of limitations or quirks that make the job just that much more difficult!
Imagine being a solo network engineer, responsible for monitoring 10 different security platforms and ensuring consistent policy across all. Then add keeping on top of license and support contracts and managing network spend to renew those items – it's a near impossible task.
When your network is difficult to manage, it has a ripple effect, and your users will soon be impacted. It should be a no-brainer to have a unified vendor approach across your trust.
The solution: A unified network and security platform
Leading Multi-Academy Trusts are removing complexity by consolidating their digital estate and rethinking their IT strategy.
With Fortinet’s Security Fabric and SD-WAN, trusts gain:
One single perimeter instead of multiple firewalls
Fast, application-aware connectivity between every school
Trust-wide safeguarding enforcement
Full visibility into apps, users, and network health
Simple reporting for audits and leadership oversight
Zero-touch deployments to onboard new schools quickly
Consistent experiences for staff and pupils
A unified network removes the hidden costs created by fragmented estates, often reducing both OpEx and CapEx.
How Nasstar helps MATs eliminate these hidden costs
As a certified Fortinet partner with deep education experience, Nasstar supports MATs by:
Consolidating multiple disparate systems into a unified Fortinet platform
Designing a standard network template for all schools in the trust
Implementing SD-WAN to stabilise connectivity and prioritise safeguarding
Centralising identity and access management
Providing co-managed services to reduce internal workload
Offering 24/7 support and proactive monitoring
Improving reporting and visibility for leadership
Reducing duplicated spend on licences, hardware, and services
Trusts that have made this shift report faster onboarding, more predictable performance, and significantly lower operational overhead.
I’ve seen so often that the specialist support on offer to MATs is based on what schools needed 10 years ago, but modern MATs operate much more like a commercial business in scale, number of users, and reliance on technology.
Schools need to invest in networks that are designed and managed appropriately. Nasstar has created a specialist managed network offering for MATs that strikes the balance between providing an enterprise-grade network whilst optimising IT budgets as much as possible.
Securing your network with Nasstar
When Multi-Academy Trusts rely on multiple vendors, tools, and legacy networks, the costs compound quickly - financially, operationally, and in terms of safeguarding risk.
A unified, secure network isn’t just a technical choice. It’s a strategic investment in the trust’s long-term stability, safety, and digital future.
See how we’re already supporting MATs with secure networks
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