Customer stories

Potteries Educational Trust (PET) is a multi-academy trust serving young people from the age of three through to post-16 education. At Potteries Educational Trust, education is about people first. With multiple schools to protect and limited IT resources, cybersecurity had to be strong without being intrusive. By working with ESET, the Trust simplified security, reduced daily pressure on staff and gained peace of mind, allowing everyone to focus on learning.

ESET gives us assurance that our schools are protected, allowing us to focus fully on education rather than worrying about cyber threats. ESET are like an extension of our team, they are experts in what they do so we can trust them with what they do best so we can focus on what we do!

James Earp, Director of IT Potteries Educational Trust

The challenge

Cybersecurity is central to the Trust’s operations, underpinning safeguarding, protecting sensitive student and staff data, ensuring compliance with GDPR and DfE guidance and supporting uninterrupted teaching and learning. However, managing multiple security tools across different schools created complexity, inconsistent endpoint protection, limited threat visibility and significant administrative burden for a small IT team therefore increasing overall risk. A potential cyber breach would carry serious consequences, including data exposure, disruption to education, financial loss and reputational damage, with the added risk of impacting the safety and wellbeing of learners and staff.

The solution

The Trust selected ESET following trusted sector recommendations and thorough research into providers with a proven track record in education. ESET stood out for its reliability, effective protection and minimal impact on system performance, a crucial factor in busy learning environments. Partnering with a vendor that understands the unique demands of education ensured security that is both robust and unobtrusive. Through a unified platform, ESET now delivers consistent protection across all academies while still allowing individual schools the flexibility to tailor settings to their specific needs, striking the right balance between standardisation and autonomy within a multi-academy trust.

The results

With cyber threats such as ransomware and phishing becoming increasingly sophisticated, ESET’s Managed Detection and Response (MDR) services have enabled the Trust to stay ahead of evolving risks. ESET now forms a core part of its endpoint protection and long-term security strategy, supporting a more proactive, intelligence-led approach as the digital estate continues to grow. The overall impact can be summed up in one word: confidence, providing assurance that schools are protected and allowing leadership and IT teams to focus on education, knowing they have a trusted cybersecurity partner acting as an extension of their team.