Greenshaw Learning Trust

From maintained school to multi-academy trust - a payroll and pensions' evolution

Pre-Academisation

In 2007 Greenshaw High School tendered its payroll and pension requirement. Costly errors were becoming more and more frequent through the incumbent supplier and we needed a provider who could not only manage the day-to-day complexity of school payroll and pensions administration but also accommodate our vision of becoming an academy.

After a formal tender process, we chose Strictly Education who then successfully supported us in our transition to academy status in June 2011.

Academisation

As a centralised executive team one of the main reasons we chose Strictly Education was because of their portal and the visibility it gave us across multiple schools and cost centres. We also needed a robust account management team to manage expansion.

In 2015 two new academies joined the Trust. Because of Strictly Education’s knowledge of different local authority set-ups and the requirements of Teachers Pensions’ (TP) and Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS), they were able to quickly pick-up and transfer the existing data to the portal before making it readily available for download and submission.

Post-Academisation

As the needs of our multi-academy trust evolve Strictly Education has met them through technological innovation. Specifically, TR6 (starter) and TR8 (leaver) forms are now posted to the portal for easy upload to the TP secure transfer unit – giving me a significant time saving every month. In addition both LGPS and TP pension data is uploaded to the portal each month to ensure complete visibility and control. Finally, the recent launch of the portal absence management tool will help us reduce the significant cost to the Trust caused by unscheduled staff absence in 2016.