Our home region
IT Support for Schools in the East Midlands
AIT supports 249 schools and 20 multi-academy trusts across the whole of the UK — but the East Midlands is where it all started, and it’s still where our school community is densest. Founded inside a Nottingham school in 2000, headquartered in Long Eaton today, we deliver managed IT support, installations and connectivity to schools from the Trent to the Soar — with the same service, platforms and helpdesk behind every one.
The region that built us
Most IT providers open an office in a region. We were built inside one of its schools. AIT began in 2000 at George Spencer Academy in Nottingham, supporting the site from within — and that first school is still with us today. From there, the pattern that grew the business was simple and very local: do the work well, and one headteacher recommends you to the next. Over 25 years that word-of-mouth carried us across Nottinghamshire, into Derbyshire and down to Leicestershire, until AIT became one of the East Midlands’ largest school IT service providers — and then kept going, because the same recommendations don’t stop at a regional boundary. Today our engineers are as likely to be commissioning a network in the North West or the South East as ten minutes from head office.
But the roots show. Our head office and our two ISO 27001-compliant data centres sit in Long Eaton, Nottinghamshire — almost exactly halfway between Nottingham and Derby, minutes from the M1. The school communities around us are ones we’ve grown up alongside: city primaries and academy trusts in Nottingham and Derby, secondaries and market-town schools across the county districts, and campuses down the M1 corridor into Leicester and Leicestershire. When an East Midlands school calls us, it isn’t reaching a national brand’s regional franchise — it’s calling the company that was founded here, staffed here, and never left.
We support schools across the whole of the UK — see where we work for how national coverage runs, or read on for the local picture.
Three cities, three local stories
The East Midlands isn’t one school community — it’s several, each with its own geography, its own trusts and its own history with us. These pages tell each city’s story properly:
IT Support for Schools in Nottingham
Where AIT was founded in 2000, and still home to our head office, our data centres and our largest concentration of supported schools — city and county alike.
IT Support for Schools in Derby
A short hop across the Trent from our Long Eaton base: support days, installations and connectivity for schools throughout Derby and Derbyshire.
IT Support for Schools in Leicester
Down the M1 corridor: schools and academies across Leicester and Leicestershire, from single-form-entry primaries to multi-site secondaries.
Elsewhere in the region — or elsewhere in the country? The service is identical wherever you are. Where we work explains how, or tell us your postcode and we’ll talk it through.
Remote-first support, with engineers who know the patch
Wherever a school is, support starts the same way: our 24/7 helpdesk answers, an engineer triages the ticket against our published ticket priorities, and the majority of issues are resolved remotely without anyone travelling at all. That remote-first model is what lets one team serve 249 schools nationwide — and it means a whiteboard failing at 8:55am in Loughborough gets the same immediate response as one in London.
When hands on site are needed, geography becomes our friend. Long Eaton sits at the centre of the region’s road network — between Nottingham and Derby, beside the M1, with Leicester a straight run south — so for East Midlands schools, scheduled technician days, urgent callouts and project visits are travelling minutes and miles, not hours and motorways. Every visit is planned in AIT Atlas, our own operations platform, which rosters each job to an engineer by skills, site familiarity and travel time — so your school sees consistent, familiar faces, and the van that arrives carries what the job actually needs.
The offer itself never changes with the postcode: scheduled onsite days as standard, our own installation crews for cabling, wireless and summer works, and fully managed, on-demand or third-line support models you can move between as your school or trust changes. The East Midlands just happens to be the part of the map where our travel times are shortest — because it’s home.
Every East Midlands school sees exactly how we’re performing
Being the local firm doesn’t earn us a free pass — it raises the bar. Every AIT support contract, in this region and everywhere else, includes Helpdesk Reporting, our own platform that publishes your school’s support performance to you all year round: SLA compliance against our published ticket priorities, first-time fix rates, response times and satisfaction scores, with an Executive overview built for heads and business managers and per-trust filters for multi-academy trusts. Your leadership team never has to take our word for how the service is going — the numbers are on screen, every month, without asking.
Illustrative figures — your school sees its own numbers in Helpdesk Reporting.
Helpdesk Reporting is one of four platforms we’ve built in-house — alongside AIT Horizon for leadership finance, compliance and strategy, AIT Atlas for operations and scheduling, and AIT Ordering for procurement. All four come with our service, not sold on top, behind one Customer Portal login.
East Midlands schools, straight answers
Yes — and well beyond. AIT supports 249 schools and 20 multi-academy trusts across the whole of the UK, so the honest answer to “do you cover us?” is almost always yes wherever you are. What the East Midlands gets on top is density: our head office and data centres are in Long Eaton, our engineer clusters are thickest between Nottingham, Derby and Leicester, and our history here runs back to 2000. Call 0115 9170 197 or send us your postcode and we’ll confirm your coverage in one conversation.
Not at all. The city pages exist because those areas have their own stories to tell, not because they mark an edge. A school in Mansfield, Chesterfield, Melton Mowbray or anywhere else in the region gets exactly the same service — 24/7 helpdesk, scheduled technician days planned in AIT Atlas, our own installation crews and all four platforms included. The same is true of a school in Cornwall or Cumbria; see where we work for how national coverage runs.
As one engagement, not two. A multi-academy trust with sites in three counties gets one helpdesk, one account relationship and one rota covering every school, with per-trust filters in Helpdesk Reporting so your central team sees each site’s support picture side by side. That’s exactly the shape of client our model was built for — read how we work with multi-academy trusts.
Both, honestly. We were founded inside a Nottingham school in 2000, our head office and two ISO 27001-compliant data centres are still in Long Eaton, and this region holds our deepest roots and densest school community. But our clients are spread across the UK, and our support model — remote-first helpdesk, nationally rostered engineers, project crews that deliver anywhere — was built for distance. The region shaped us; it doesn’t limit us.
Urgent issues are handled first by the 24/7 helpdesk, which resolves most incidents remotely — usually the fastest fix regardless of geography. When a visit is needed, our Long Eaton base and the region’s engineer density mean East Midlands schools sit within short, well-worn routes for our team, and every scheduled day and callout is planned in AIT Atlas so a confirmed date is a kept date. Response commitments themselves are published per priority on our ticket priorities page — the same standards for every school we support, wherever it is.
The local firm that grew national — still answering on the first ring
Founded in an East Midlands school. Headquartered here ever since. Trusted by 249 schools and 20 trusts across the UK. If your school wants a provider with national scale and genuinely local roots, we’re a short conversation away.
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