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. Strategy, improvement, finance, risk, assurance and governance all exist to make that delivery possible. Our advisory work helps trusts do it well. ORSIA exists because doing it well is not enough when the picture is scattered across the systems a trust already runs and nobody can see the whole. Not the executive, not the board, and not the DfE, Ofsted or the families a trust answers to. People and a platform. Better outcomes for every pupil, in every school.
Our practice is led by people who have run schools and trusts from the inside, and who know the difference between how a trust is supposed to work and how it actually does.
DfE-accredited School Resource Management Advisers, ISBL Fellows, chartered accountants and specialists across every discipline a trust runs on.
We work as colleagues rather than visiting consultants, and we stay long enough for the improvement to hold.
The frameworks a trust adapts and the evidence it builds are its own. ORSIA holds them together, so the improvement lasts beyond any work we do.
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, 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.
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. ORSIA is the platform that puts the answers in one place. One model where they meet, designed around how a MAT genuinely runs, shaped 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.