Remote lessons take root at Ashmarsh Learning Trust after moving to Teaching Suite Advance
One way of working across 43 schools, built in a single term
Ashmarsh Learning Trust brings together primary and secondary schools spread across two counties — coastal villages, market towns and one inner-city site. Several joined the trust after years of falling rolls, and about a third sit in wards with high levels of child poverty. The trust's plan has always been to lift results by sharing what works between schools, and technology carries a lot of that weight. In 2013 it standardised on Delthara Teaching Suite for mail, file storage and shared documents; the cohort tools followed in 2016.
Standardising was the easy part. Keeping 43 schools working the same way was not. Each site had grown its own habits — different naming for shared drives, different ways of handing work to pupils, different rules about who could see what. When a family moved between trust schools, almost nothing carried across with them.
“Everyone already knew how to use it, so it was a short leap to make. That mattered more than any feature list. It was the only platform that could grow with us as schools joined, without a long implementation or a second budget round.”
Neve Corrigan, digital learning lead, Ashmarsh Learning TrustTwo weeks to move 27,400 pupils
When the trust's three newest schools joined in early 2024, its IT leads used the moment to move everyone onto Delthara Teaching Suite Advance. Cohorts were rebuilt from the central pupil record rather than by hand, so a teacher opening a cohort on the first morning of term found the right pupils, the right briefs and the right shared folder already in place. Join keys were retired entirely — pupils are added by roll, not by typing a code off a whiteboard.
The Advance tier also gave the trust's data protection officer something she had asked for since 2019: one place to see where pupil work lives, who has opened it and which files have been shared beyond the trust. Retention rules that used to be a page in a policy document are now applied automatically, school by school.
Teaching staff noticed a smaller thing first. Marking a set of briefs no longer meant three tabs and a spreadsheet — feedback, resubmissions and the running record of a pupil's progress sit on one screen, and heads of year can read across a whole cohort without asking anyone to export anything.