Our head of service relationships attends the School and Academies Show 2025

Last week, Louisa Sharp, Head of Service Relationships, represented Dixons at the Schools and Academies Show 2025 at ExCeL London. The event, attended by over 3,000 school leaders, focused on sharing best practice, exploring sector challenges, and discovering innovative solutions.

Louisa took part in an ‘around the fireplace’ session, where she spoke about the trust’s business services transformation -how the model has evolved, the challenges faced, and what lies ahead since the completion of phase 2.

Louisa reflected on the initial issues within our operational model, including a lack of accountability, unclear service boundaries, and a reliance on informal, untracked requests. With limited visibility and no service-level agreements in place, it was difficult to ensure consistent, high-quality service across our academies. Since then, significant improvements have been made. The introduction of a central service management system (TOPdesk) has brought greater transparency and consistency, with requests now tracked against defined SLAs. A comprehensive service catalogue, knowledge articles, and self-service tools support staff in accessing the help they need more efficiently. We continue to enhance the system based on regular feedback.

Performance dashboards now help us monitor service levels and respond quickly when improvements are needed. Our current SLA performance stands at 90.2% for response and 93.7% for completion. We’ve also introduced Nintex, a process mapping platform that has transformed how we work. With around 250 processes now mapped and published on our intranet, staff can see each step clearly, understand responsibilities, and give feedback - all helping us work from one version of the truth.

This transformation has supported cultural change too, strengthening internal networks such as academy admin huddles and enabling clearer career progression routes. This transformation has also helped shift the culture across our teams - demonstrating that managing performance can be a positive and empowering process, and reinforcing our commitment to being more customer-focused than ever before.

Louisa’s contribution at the show highlighted both the operational progress we’ve made and the wider benefits of rethinking support services across a trust. We look forward to building on this work as we move into the next phase of development.