A Bristol academy trust cut IT spend while improving its systems
Nine schools, nine different suppliers, and a shrinking budget. Bebco built a consolidation roadmap that saved money and raised the standard across every school.
Headline result
Reduction in total annual IT spend
A nine-school multi-academy trust in Bristol
Bristol, United Kingdom
The challenge
What they were up against
The trust had grown by absorbing schools that each arrived with their own IT supplier, contracts, and standards. The result was nine ways of doing everything, wildly varying costs, and no consistent view of security or safeguarding controls across the estate. With budgets under real pressure, the trust needed to spend less without leaving any school worse off.
It also lacked the in-house expertise to plan the consolidation itself. It needed an independent view of what to keep, what to retire, and in what order, backed by someone who could then deliver it.
The solution
What Bebco did
Bebco acted as the trust's virtual IT director, producing a costed three-year roadmap and then delivering against it, school by school.
- Audited all nine schools' contracts, hardware, and licensing, then modelled the savings from consolidating onto shared standards.
- Standardised on Microsoft 365 for Education with consistent safeguarding, filtering, and access controls across every school.
- Renegotiated and consolidated connectivity and support into single trust-wide agreements, removing duplicated cost.
- Provided ongoing vCIO strategy so the trust's leadership has an IT plan tied to its budget cycle, not a stack of disconnected supplier relationships.
The results
Measured, not estimated
Lower total annual IT spend
Schools on one consistent standard
Costed roadmap tied to the budget cycle
“We are spending less and every school is better protected than before. Bebco gave us the strategy we did not have the capacity to write ourselves.”
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