Creating time for overstretched teams

Education remains a reseller priority despite budget pressure

Education environments in the UK represent a large and important market. With more than 24,000 state-sector school organisations and 2,500+ independent schools, the addressable audience in education is too large to ignore. At the same time, budgetary constraints and operational pressure are widely reported. In the IT and MPS channel, education is often rightly seen as a difficult space. The long-standing focus on print delivery and device sales is being massively affected by budgetary challenges.

However, in the state sector, 81% of schools are already struggling with staffing costs, alongside an 8% increase in staff costs predicted for the coming year. Financial pressure has also intensified over time, with the proportion of schools and trusts reporting an in-year financial deficit rising from around 30% two to three years ago to approaching 60% in the latest reported period.

The Independent school sector is also experiencing significant change. Becoming subject to 20% VAT has been estimated to result in a loss of 11,000 to 13,000 pupils attending independent schools. Fewer pupils mean less income, which creates a need for commercial efficiency, including reclaiming VAT effectively and improving invoicing and related processes.

Alongside these financial drivers, education organisations are experiencing a strong shift to cloud services and platforms such as Teams for Education and Google Classroom. As data moves into multiple repositories—Teams, SharePoint, Google Drive, and other locations—information becomes distributed across more silos. Figures cited indicate staff can spend almost 9.5 hours per week looking for information, creating a direct efficiency challenge in environments already under staffing cost pressure.

The approach: an efficiency framework for documents, data, and devices

These significant challenges require the MPS and IT reseller to rethink how they deliver value to the education audience. Under prolonged budgetary challenges, many more traditional budget-cutting tools have already been exhausted. Reduction in colour printing, more aggressive page pricing, device reductions, and software licensing rationalisation are all but exhausted.

In this lean landscape, one feature cannot be ignored. Education needs to find efficiency for its people. The scale of documentation, data processes, and requirements grows almost daily, while the team tasked with delivering it does not. It’s this “efficiency angle” that turns the budget constraint in education into an opportunity for both the channel and the affected schools.

 On-ramps and off-ramps: managing paper input and output

The dramatic shift to cloud has left schools with a gap where elements long considered standard have been. Print servers are just one example. Losing print server administration isn’t an unwelcome outcome for many schools, but it does leave an IT administration challenge in its place. 

Print and scan devices remain central touchpoints in education where people interact with documents. Print management is not only about controlling print output, but also about access to paper services. Just as critical as enabling print, managing paper input through secure scanning and routing is now more critical than ever. This “on and off-ramp” concept focuses on securing devices and enabling documents to be captured and moved into digital processes efficiently.

Advanced scanning is a key element, including secure routing from MFDs and supported scanners. Workflows can be tied to specific users and configured to capture named values and other fields at the point of scanning, supporting downstream compliance goals.

Processing engines: removing manual data entry from document workflows

Once documents are captured, whether from paper or digital sources, processing becomes a major efficiency lever. Manually naming, indexing, and storing electronic documents is time-consuming and contributes to operational overhead. It is also an area of potential compliance issues and financial risk. Processing engines are positioned to extract data from documents and deliver it securely and efficiently without manual re-keying.

Digital processing tools deliver different benefits and approaches but share a core purpose: extracting data, routing documents to the right place, and reducing the manual effort required.

Data hubs: search, sharing, and security across silos

After capture and processing, the next requirement is the ability to find, share, and govern information across multiple storage locations. The shift to the cloud, in conjunction with the growth of multi-academy trusts, often results in a larger, more complex, or more confusing range of “Data Silos” than ever before. As more storage is provisioned with potentially more complex licensing or security restrictions, users find the need to store files in ever-wider collections of destinations. 

Using a data hub as a layer that enables efficient search and secure access across silos, including Microsoft and Google environments, cloud object storage such as Amazon S3 and Wasabi, and potentially legacy on-premise servers, drives efficiency in both labour and potentially cost. Enabling organisations to consider the most cost-effective way to support data storage without the fear of access and security challenges.

This hub layer is also tied to auditability and compliance. It enables organisations to understand who accessed information and where it was used, while reducing time spent searching for documents.

Delivery and support: enabling implementation without heavy reseller investment

All of these elements offer schools plenty of reasons to investigate investments in infrastructure to reduce associated soft costs. However, these projects must still be delivered with cost efficiency in mind. Requiring the reseller channel to be confident and efficient in delivery and support. While many resellers hold trusted relationships with education customers and understand the key concepts, they often remain cautious due to a shortage of sales and technical skills in these specialist areas.

To be successful, the channel needs specialist support positioned around understanding commercial drivers, sector context, statistics, and legislation. Alongside delivery and long-term support services intended to ensure solutions are implemented as expected and remain supported.

Key use cases in education

Print and scan device management: cost, risk reduction, and IT overhead

Print services often account for up to 3% of a school’s annual budget, making it a meaningful cost area at scale, particularly for multi-academy trusts. Where print management is not in place, an average 15% saving is achievable through securing devices and simply reducing open print. 

Beyond page reduction, device and driver management is a major operational issue, especially in trusts centralising IT across many schools and managing potentially hundreds of print queues. Efficient management of drivers and queues can reduce IT overhead and enable the adoption of new hardware platforms, including ARM-based devices such as Snapdragon-based machines or Mac “Neo” laptops. This “soft cost” reduction through fewer support tickets and less time spent managing print infrastructure frees up IT staff to manage larger, potentially more beneficial, projects while ensuring schools can benefit from the most cost-effective computer hardware.

Data security and document digitisation are also positioned as drivers of risk reduction. Education organisations remain subject to GDPR and are required to store auditable copies of documents. A significant breach can have a financial impact through fines and potential forced infrastructure changes, making security and digitisation relevant as “cost protection,” not just cost reduction. Ensuring scanned documents are delivered only through properly configured processes to designated, validated endpoints ensures documents are digitised in line with all data security policies, reducing the risk of financial penalty.

SEN and SEND compliance: managing EHCP documentation at scale

Special educational needs and SEND requirements are a major and growing component in education. Approximately 638,000 EHCPs are active in the UK, alongside increasing compliance requirements, including SEND statutory return expectations and the need to supply specific data points across student records related to EHCPs.

EHCP-related records document-heavy and operationally complex. EHCPs are growing by around 15 to 30 documents per year, with an average of around 200 separate documents by the end of a student’s tenure in secondary school. Retention requirements extend until the pupil reaches age 25, creating long-term storage and retrieval demands for a complex and wide-ranging collection of information.

With the average size of a multi-academy trust around 12 schools, the scale becomes significant. This complex information store potentially drives tens of thousands of documents when compounded over time. Many of these documents arrive on paper, reinforcing the need for secure capture, structured processing and storage.

Secure document sharing: ensuring compliant access to data and documents without adding to admin burdens

As the breadth of documents and storage grows, so does the need to interface with external parties and agencies. Often, schools resort to specialist tools to share documents or to enforce acknowledgement of receipt or interaction with the information. These platforms often introduce added cost and complexity to an already overstretched administration resource. While many popular tools, such as Microsoft SharePoint or Google Drive, offer limited sharing capabilities, they often require complex administration and lead to further file duplication or the creation of additional data silos.

As requirements for broader policy agreement and complex inter-agency data sharing increase, so does the need for schools to have a simple, user-level toolset capable of meeting these requirements. Whether engaging with groups of users securely for the capture of groups of people to accept terms and conditions, secure and auditable sharing of groups of documents in different silos to external agencies or the simple addition of documents to public portals, a secure, auditable and storage agnostic platform can reduce admin overhead and IT reliance. 

Accounts payable and VAT efficiency: scaling finance operations in trusts and independent schools

Independent schools have a significant financial challenge to become more efficient and cost-effective following changes in legislation that made them subject to charging 20% VAT. The burden of these changes not only adds a new focus on reclaiming VAT and ensuring accounts payable processes do not become disproportionately expensive, but also keeps accounts charged and paid in a timely fashion to aid cash flow. While not affected by financial legislation in this way, academy trusts may be processing significant volumes of accounts payable invoices across multiple sites. Often, trusts benefit from a centralised accounts payable function that must remain HMRC-compliant and scale as trusts grow.

Efficiency requirements include receiving invoices through mail or secure scanning, capturing the right field information, and ensuring auditable approvals. Approval workflows become ever more critical as the scale and remote nature of an organisation increases. Tracking who signed off on payments, ensuring the right approvers, based on rules such as invoice value thresholds or departmental responsibility, are engaged, is a critical concern. Faster processing is also linked to the possibility of prioritising payments to certain suppliers to obtain discounts, which is described as an opportunity many schools and trusts are not set up to benefit from.

Method in practice: capture, extract, route, and search with auditability

Organisations can achieve a significant reduction in administrative overhead by creating simple, secure workflows that integrate scanning, document data extraction, routing, and hub-based search and sharing.

Secure capture and routing from scanning workflows

When configuring a scanning workflow to send documents to a specified, locked processing channel, such as the SEN document process or Accounts Payable invoicing. The designated processing tool captures metadata fields such as date of birth, subject names, Supplier Name, Invoice Number, and Invoice Values. Workflows can be secured to specific users, supporting controlled submission and consistent capture.

Data extraction and validation in processing

A processing step is described that identifies extracted data points from the document, including examples such as an NHS number, an address, and the requesting professional. The process can be fully automated or configured to require user validation for demonstration or control. Tasks and acknowledgements are documented in the audit trail, confirming that a file existed and was handled.

Storage aligned to organisational strategy

An organisation’s network storage is a strategic choice, with organisations often preferring to store documents within their adopted platform, such as Google Drive and Microsoft SharePoint, rather than creating additional silos. An example is given of routing processed documents into Google Drive for a Google-adopted organisation, including naming conventions derived from extracted and validated data.

Hub-based search across silos, including GDPR-oriented discovery

Schools can implement a “hub layer”. Connected to all existing storage architecture, and enabling search across multiple silos based on metadata values and document content. This reduces time spent searching and supports GDPR-related discovery across HR archives, user data stores, SEN locations, and other repositories, regardless of whether content resides in Google, SharePoint, exported data, or cloud storage buckets.

The hub supports content-based identification of GDPR concerns and summarising documents, alongside enabling decisions and filtering based on compliance-related criteria. The impact is a reduction in processing time for data requests and support for more cost-effective storage for files required for long-term storage.

Sharing and audit: reducing administrative overhead for external distribution

Beyond internal search and retrieval, external sharing is a recurring requirement. Sharing documents with parents or carers and with external agencies such as local authorities. A hub-enabled sharing approach is described as reducing overhead by distributing a single correct version of a document to a cohort, collecting agreement without complex workflows, and keeping results searchable. This is a way to reduce repeated administrative effort associated with paper-based collection or fragmented email-based responses.

Key implications: efficiency, compliance, and operational resilience

Education organisations are facing simultaneous pressures: rising staffing costs, increasing deficit expectations, expanding document volumes, and a shift to cloud that spreads information across more locations. In this context, efficiency is doing more with existing resources. Reducing manual data entry, reducing time spent searching for information, and lowering IT overhead associated with print drivers and queue management.

Compliance and auditability are essential. GDPR obligations, auditable document storage, SEND-related data point requirements, and HMRC compliance in finance processes. Risk reduction, while not a cost reduction in itself, should be a significant financial consideration, particularly where breaches or non-compliance can trigger fines or forced infrastructure changes.

The efficiency framework is a structured way for schools and education organisations to connect print and scan management, document processing, and hub-based search and sharing, while aligning with the organisation’s chosen platform strategy and maintaining audit trails across capture, processing, access, and distribution.