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Multi-academy trusts face two competing pressures: growing cyber threats and stretched IT teams already juggling ageing infrastructure, endless support tickets, and exam season chaos.
The instinctive response is often to push more security onto school IT. More tools, more policies, more alerts. The result is usually the opposite of what you want: fatigue, inconsistency, and gaps that leave you vulnerable.
This guide explores how MATs can standardise cyber security in a way that’s realistic for IT teams, aligned with Department for Education expectations, and actually reduces operational noise.
Why MATs Cannot Ignore the Cyber Risk
The education sector is no longer a soft target. It’s simply a target, and often an easy one at that.
According to the UK government’s Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2024:
- 52% of primary schools identified a cyber security breach or attack
- 71% of secondary schools did
- 86% of further education colleges and 97% of higher education institutions did
This compares with 50% of UK businesses overall. The Information Commissioner’s Office reported more than 3,000 cyber breaches in 2023, with education accounting for around 11% of incidents.
For MATs, this risk is multiplied by shared systems across multiple academies and varied cyber security maturity between schools. A single weak link in one academy can put the wider trust at risk.
Related Reading: The 10 Biggest Cybersecurity Gaps in UK Schools (And How to Fix Them In 2026).
The Human Factor: Why Training Alone Isn’t Enough
The ICO analysed 215 insider cyber incidents from the education sector between January 2022 and August 2024. They found that 57% of insider incidents were caused by students, and around 30% involved stolen or guessed login details, with students responsible for 97% of these.
This tells us two things. First, weak identity and access management is a genuine risk, not just a compliance concern. Second, you cannot rely on technical controls alone or on a once-a-year cyber awareness day.
Related Reading: Cybersecurity for Schools: A Headteacher’s Guide to Protecting Your Community.
The Policy Landscape MATs Must Align To
The DfE has set clear expectations. Cyber security is one of the six core digital and technology standards that all schools and colleges should be working towards meeting by 2030.
Requirements include conducting a cyber risk assessment annually and reviewing it every term, controlling user accounts and access privileges, implementing robust backup and recovery, and ensuring incidents are reported to Action Fraud, the DfE, and the ICO where applicable.
The National Cyber Security Centre promotes Cyber Essentials as a proven baseline. The NCSC’s 2024 Annual Review notes that organisations implementing Cyber Essentials controls are 92% less likely to make a claim on their cyber insurance.
Related Reading: What is Cyber Essentials? A Plain-English Guide for Business Owners.
Why IT Teams Feel Overloaded
Most MAT IT teams are small. A handful of technicians supporting several sites, each with slightly different setups, legacy equipment, and inherited contracts.
Commonly, each academy has its own way of handling user accounts and passwords, backups are configured differently or not regularly tested, and incident response lives in the head of one or two key people.
If you try to standardise cyber security purely by writing more policies and asking IT to implement everything, you will burn people out. The answer is not more effort. It’s more structure.
Five Ways MATs Can Standardise Cyber Security Without Overloading IT
1. Start with a Realistic, Trust-Wide Baseline
Define a minimum viable security baseline that every academy must meet in a set timeframe. For example, all schools must meet the DfE cyber security standards at baseline level in year one, with Cyber Essentials certification for key shared systems running in parallel.
Use the DfE guidance and NCSC Cyber Essentials control areas as your reference points. Once the baseline is agreed at trust level, IT’s job becomes implementing a defined set of outcomes instead of chasing vague expectations.
Related Reading: How to Prepare for Your Cyber Essentials Audit (Without Losing Your Sanity).
2. Centralise Where It Reduces Workload
Centralisation should remove repetitive work from school IT, not concentrate every approval in a tiny central team.
Areas that usually make sense to centralise:
- Identity and access management
- Endpoint protection and patching
- Backups and disaster recovery
- Email security and anti-phishing controls
Areas that may remain local include classroom devices, first-line support, and local delivery of awareness through assemblies or staff briefings.
3. Tackle Identity and Access First
Given the ICO’s findings about weak credentials, identity and access is usually the highest-impact place to standardise first.
For a MAT, that means:
- One consistent approach to password policies based on NCSC guidance
- Central rules for multi-factor authentication, especially for staff and administrative accounts
- A standardised process for creating, changing, and removing accounts
- Role-based access so staff only see systems and data they genuinely need
Simple process design helps IT teams. For example, HR completes a single trust-wide digital form when a new staff member joins, triggering account creation, group memberships, and device provisioning consistently.
4. Make Awareness Sustainable and Specific to Real Risks
Most people in schools have already heard “don’t click suspicious links”. They need practical, contextual guidance instead.
Focus awareness efforts on:
- Protecting and handling passwords
- Locking screens when devices are unattended
- Reporting suspicious access or device behaviour quickly
- Setting clear expectations for student behaviour with school systems
Rather than asking IT to design every session, use NCSC resources designed for schools, embed short messages into staff briefings and INSET days, and provide template lesson content for computing departments.
5. Build a Simple, Shared Incident Playbook
When something goes wrong, schools often lose time working out who to call, what to isolate, and how to inform parents, the ICO, or the DfE.
A trust-wide incident response playbook should cover:
- What to do in the first 24 to 48 hours of a suspected incident
- When and how to escalate to the central trust team
- Steps to contain common scenarios like ransomware or compromised email accounts
- Who is responsible for regulatory reporting
For IT teams, a good playbook reduces cognitive load in a crisis. They follow a known pattern instead of improvising.
A Phased Roadmap MATs Can Follow
Structure cyber standardisation as a phased programme:
Phase 1: Discover and baseline (3 to 6 months)
Map your existing estate, perform a trust-wide cyber risk assessment aligned to DfE standards, and agree a trust-wide minimum baseline with board approval.
Phase 2: Centralise and harden (6 to 12 months)
Implement central identity and access management, standardise endpoint protection and patching, move to consistent backup and recovery policies, and roll out your trust-wide incident playbook.
Phase 3: Optimise and evidence (ongoing)
Track progress against DfE standards and Cyber Essentials controls, run targeted penetration testing where risk is highest, and use dashboards to provide board-level visibility of cyber posture across schools.
By treating this as a strategic change programme, you create space for proper planning, prioritisation, and resourcing.
Where Fortifi Can Help
At Fortifi, we work with schools, academies, and MATs that want to build realistic, defensible cyber security programmes.
Penetration testing should be one of the cornerstones of your cyber security strategy and certainly should not be treated as a box-ticking exercise. With years of experience working with educational organisations on a range of budgets, we’re uniquely positioned to help you achieve your security goals.
The aim is always the same: a trust-wide security posture that’s consistent and robust, without asking already stretched IT staff to do the impossible.
Bringing It All Together
Standardising cyber security across a multi-academy trust is not about locking everything down overnight. It’s about choosing a clear baseline, centralising areas that genuinely reduce workload and risk, fixing identity and access as a priority, building sustainable awareness, and giving every school the same simple playbook when something goes wrong.
The threat is real, and the statistics show that education remains a prime target. But with a structured, trust-wide approach, MATs can significantly reduce their exposure while making life easier for IT teams.