From the boiler room to the boardroom.
Operational and business leadership support for schools, academies and trusts, so leaders can focus on pupils.
Schools deliver education. Operations make that delivery possible. When operations work, pupils benefit. That is the only outcome that matters.
We have run the operations of schools and trusts. We know what the job looks like on a Tuesday in November.
DfE-accredited School Resource Management Advisers, ISBL Fellows, chartered accountants and estates professionals.
We work as trusted colleagues, not visiting consultants, and we stay to embed the improvement, not just recommend it.
Frameworks, templates, and now ORSIA, built so the improvement outlives the engagement and belongs to the trust, not to us.
School business specialist and executive school leader. Runs the advisory practice, and leads business development, engagement and implementation for ORSIA, the trusts it works with and how it lands in them. Twenty-four years of running the operations of schools and a trust, and of hearing from hundreds of leaders across the sector what the job actually asks of them.
Chartered accountant, finance and strategy leader. Leads strategy, finance and product development for 1st Pillar, and designed and led the development of ORSIA, its architecture, its data model and the business logic that turns a trust's data into one picture. Twenty-five years of hearing about the sector's challenges over dinner, and a career alongside major consulting firms, now brought to bear on solving them.
Around Emma and Paul sits a hand-picked network of associates, each working in the field. They cover the operational disciplines you would expect and the areas that carry the most weight for pupils: inclusion, SEND, safeguarding, attendance and the quality of education. They have worked in primary, secondary, special and alternative provision, in maintained schools, single academies and multi-academy trusts, and at every level from school office to trust board. We bring in the right people for the work, and only those people.
Integrated curriculum and financial planning, budgeting and forecasting, internal scrutiny, procurement and data.
Inclusion and SEND, safeguarding and welfare, attendance and behaviour, alternative provision, and the quality of education.
People strategy and organisational design, restructures and TUPE, senior recruitment, governance and clerking, data protection, change and programme management.
Estates and facilities, capital bids, health and safety, statutory compliance, sustainability and climate action planning.
After two decades of watching trusts answer the same six questions in six different places, strategy here, the improvement plan there, the budget in a workbook, risk in a spreadsheet, safeguarding and compliance evidence in folders, governance in a pack put together the week before, we built the platform we wanted ourselves. One model where the answers meet, designed around how a MAT genuinely runs, by people who have run schools and trusts, and who support them now.
1st Pillar is small by design. We are not recruiting right now, but as the work grows so will the team, and we would rather know about good people before we need them than after.
School business leaders, finance directors, estates and HR professionals, and leaders in inclusion, SEND and safeguarding, who have done the job and want to help others do it well, as an associate or in time as part of the team.
Engineers, data and integration specialists, and product and design people who want to take ORSIA further with us, and who care that it is used well in real trusts.
If that sounds like you, send us a few lines about yourself and what you do. We read every one and keep in touch.