Let's unpick this a bit.
Schools got turned in to "acadamies" which ballooned in to "multi-academy trusts", mostly under the disastrously wasteful Building Schools for the Future campaign - and don't get me started on the to-this-day impact of Blair's Wonga-economics and lack of controls. The Local Authority who has the non-academy schools and the trusts (who are now allowed to be run as businesses) are viewing IT as a cost-centre with the LEA often outsourcing their IT to the likes of Capita or similar.
Where they're outsourced, they've got punitive clauses for leaving sites without a mouse, or not responding to a dead classroom display but the outsourcer are playing a game to achieve maximum profit whilst knowing they will get stung for missing some targets but not caring about performance overall. Both options are largely staffed by a rotating door of the cheapest possible entry level first-line hands-and-eyes who are simultaneously stretched thin and run ragged, having to cover multiple sites. The only end-user difference is that where they're insourced it's the same story, but with no "senior escalation" path or strategic IT leadership.
The trusts are thus the worst. Paying a pittance, they expect an overstretched hands-and-eyes level junior without mentoring to play architect or believe a supplier can be courted by a non-IT "business manager" to deliver an effective IT experience. It's all just cables and wires after all, Microsoft 365 comes with inherent backup, we bought a shiny firewall from the vendor, and we're safe because Windows has an antivirus program like 1997 on every PC. Kids can't complain when they get the blunt end - it's a captive audience and worst case they'll have to re-do their coursework when/if it goes missing with no pain to the trust's profit margin. Teachers will complain with issues but they're largely replaceable and there's some churn and supply-teacher-overhead built in to the profit model.
So when the juniors and the vendors are left to move from the legacy Microsoft Tenant to the trust that's bought them's shared Microsoft Tenant and collate on-prem storage with legacy SharePoint storage on to the new Tenant, there's no risk...to the trust. It doesn't matter that the juniors have lost a lifetime of curated and polished cumulative teacher resources by the whole of the Science team, or the Y10 coursework for the new Y11 students. The teachers can just recreate this year, it'll be good to have a fresh start with modern resources. The kids can just re-do it - I mean they probably all have copies at home anyway as they've all got a laptop each because they spend all their life on TikTok, right? Doesn't matter that the teachers have been given 135 pages of CYA policies to read, signed and tested by the legal manager and 16hrs of safeguarding training by the safeguarding lead as well as a predictive grading sheet for 260 children they've barely met by the deputy headteacher and the Head of Year has agreed a parents evening for Y8 in the second week whilst the new head of their department has instigated a mark-every-word policy, they can just recreate every lesson from scratch.
And we wonder why there's a young person's mental health crisis, and a crisis in teaching. Don't worry though, it's been nearly 14 months with the current one so it's about time she was shuffled to another role as she's probably just at the point where she understands it. As to the kids, let's just slap a glossy "Mental Health Awareness" week together instead of stopping looking at education as a way to funnel taxpayer money to private businesses and fixing the root causes. Don't worry about the junior IT guys, there's an endless supply of them and the NHS will pick up their pieces.
/rant
