Perfect preparation boosts resilience for East Lancashire Learning Group
Our session border controller solution is helping East Lancashire College Group (ELLG), a college group with a consistently ‘outstanding’ Ofsted rating, unlock the benefits of Microsoft Teams Phone.
Bringing three colleges and 60 community learning venues together created East Lancashire Learning Group (ELLG): a powerhouse college group that includes the leading FE college in the country, according to the Department for Education’s 2025/26 national achievement rates tables. The group serves learners across a large swathe of the North-West – but it had an outdated, hard-to-maintain telephony set-up. Each of its three main sites had a different legacy system and an analogue switchboard, together giving managers a five-figure maintenance bill each year.
The expense was quite an incentive to upgrade. An even bigger one, says chief information officer Andrew Dewhurst, was the need to improve resilience and make communication seamless.
Thorough planning
Microsoft Teams Phone looked the obvious choice for a new, integrated system because the group is an established Microsoft user and staff already used Teams for internal calls. To make sure it was also the right choice, ELLG started on a year-long proof-of-concept project with a small working group of support and curriculum staff trying out its various features and giving feedback.
“The key things for us are reliability and ease of use. Downtime isn’t an option, especially with safeguarding responsibilities and when we’re working with multiple internal and external stakeholders.”
“But also, when you’ve got 700 staff you want to give all of them as good an experience of change as you can. The time we spent on the proof of concept allowed us to explore all the differences Teams Phone might make, and prepare people properly.”
– Andrew Dewhurst, chief information officer, ELLG
After reviewing a number of providers, ELLG opted for our session border controller solution to break its VoIP out over the public switched phone network. We’ve got a long history with the group’s colleges, which use a variety of our services, and Andrew said our track record for service quality helped us score highly for reliability. We’re glad to say our pricing hit the mark too.
It helped that we could put the project team in touch with key people at several other colleges in the region for their tips on managing a painless implementation. We also put our internal test trunk and some test numbers at their disposal. Not all providers offer this but colleges often like it because it gives them a risk-free space to try out things like setting up hunt groups and queues to make call handling more efficient.
Once the trial finished and an implementation plan was agreed, go-live across all sites was scheduled for completion during the October half-term break. There were no surprises or delays.
“Jisc made us feel supported from pre-project guidance on configuration through testing to implementation. When we got nearer to go-live we got regular updates on what they were doing, what was happening with Jisc Oracle session border controllers and Gamma – so we were confident they were taking care of the foundational technology and we could stay focused on supporting staff.”
– Andrew Dewhurst, chief information officer, ELLG
Culture change
This support for staff was a meticulously planned 12-month programme that ran alongside the proof of concept. There were consultations, workshops, training sessions and explainer videos made in-house – plenty of opportunities for people to get comfortable with change, whatever their previous level of technical know-how. These also meant practical issues were scoped out early. For example, while most people use headsets when making calls reception staff opted for single Bluetooth earpieces, because they make it easier to talk to in-person visitors.
After October half-term staff simply logged into the new system and got on with their day, with no problems.
Hints and tips
Now that ELLG has a smooth transition under its belt, here are Andrew’s hints and tips for colleges inspired to try something similar:
- Take time to run a proof-of-concept project to test your assumptions, get buy-in from stakeholders and turn them into advocates
- Communicate and train people as much as possible during the proof-of-concept stage
- Offer drop-in sessions with IT so staff can try out their options for wearables and ask questions
- Take your time, culture change doesn’t happen overnight
- After go-live, keep up the communications and training: “we will be helping our staff get the most out of Teams Phone’s benefits for years”.
Like to know more about the session border controller service and how we can help with your telephony upgrade?