Thinking, guidance and practical perspective for the people who run schools and trusts.
Emma's newsletter. Every edition is published here, and you can subscribe on LinkedIn to get each one as it comes out.
A column for Edexec on structured thinking for school business leaders.
Longer pieces on leadership, improvement and the business of running schools, from 2024 onwards.
A regular dose of thinking, guidance and positivity for school business leaders. Published on LinkedIn first, and kept here so nothing gets lost.
September in Educationland, told in initials. A day in the life of a school business leader who knows every acronym the sector can throw at her, and what it all comes down to when the pupils go home.
Emma Gray→After a long dry summer the rain finally came, and with it a question for anyone leading a school. Before another initiative, another intervention or another pound, have we created the conditions in which the thing can work?
Emma Gray→The public sector runs on a seven-year cycle, Emma's mum used to say, and every generation believes its challenges are new. The tools and the language change, but the question underneath does not. How do we build education organisations today that help people thrive tomorrow?
Emma Gray→The 2026 Academy Trust Handbook expects new CFOs to hold an accountancy qualification, and that is fair enough. But as every function in a trust becomes more specialised, who sees how it all fits together? A case for the leaders who connect the organisation.
Emma Gray→For National School Business Leader Day, a question about the story the profession tells itself online. Real challenges deserve discussion, but a narrative of hopelessness teaches the next generation to see only the obstacles. Stop scrolling and start connecting.
Emma Gray→In 2017 Emma drew the value chain for schools in crayon. Nine years on, inputs, activities, outputs and outcomes are all still there, but they sit in different places, owned by different people and reviewed at different times, and the connections between them are what gets lost.
Emma Gray→A week in Manchester where every conversation turned to risk. There are more plates than ever, they are spinning faster and the margin for error is shrinking, yet the sector already has everything it needs except a way of seeing it all together. The first public thinking behind what became ORSIA.
Emma Gray→Schools rarely suffer from a lack of planning. The plans simply run in parallel, with different owners, different measures and different cycles. The Strategy Map framework, and the Strategic Control Triangle of outcomes, affordability and assurance, that became the architecture behind ORSIA.
Emma Gray→School business leaders are not fond of surprises, because most of the job is about shrinking the unknown. So why do so many risk registers sit unread between meetings? Make the register a live tool for improvement, tied to the plan and the decisions the board actually takes.
Emma Gray→A New Year's resolution to find the best Sunday roast, one pub a month. February takes The Earl and Emma to Jeremy Clarkson's pub near Burford, where the carvery is done properly and only the horseradish and the gravy lose a point.
Emma Gray→A classroom argument about bovine anatomy, and what it teaches about building a team. When there is a gap, bring in the expertise for as long as you need it rather than hiring for it. How well people work together matters more than having every answer in-house.
Emma Gray→Recycling bins and a policy on the website are not a climate strategy. Sustainability has to sit inside how a school runs, and the business leader is the person with the data, the budget and the standing to make that happen.
Helen Burge→Balancing what the school wants to do for its pupils against what it can afford is the first responsibility of the role. Seven practices, from a realistic budget to transparent reporting, and a reminder that nobody has to carry them alone.
Emma Gray→Every school has the capacity and the desire to improve, so why do we keep renaming improvement as development? A case for saying the word out loud, and for schools helping each other to get better.
Emma Gray→Back from the ISBL national conference, and once again struck by the generosity of the school business leader network. On what each of us can give back to it, and why the writing continues.
Emma Gray→A three-word mission statement does not make a family choose your school. Belonging is built the way a good coffee shop builds it, by paying attention to what people actually value, one interaction at a time.
Emma Gray→The connections built over twenty years in school business leadership are what made 1st Pillar possible. On keeping a network wide, across sectors and platforms, and on being useful to it before you need it.
Emma Gray→The school business leader role is hard to walk into from outside education, and good appointments are lost in the first term for want of support. What a structured first hundred days looks like, and why it protects the recruit and the school.
Emma Gray→It is easy to be cynical about whether anything changes. On the responsibility to keep saying it anyway: funding, the treatment of support staff, the state of the estate, and what collective advocacy can still shift.
Emma Gray→Five lessons from twenty-two years as a school business leader: speak up, build the network, welcome change, look after yourself, and find the meaning in the daily work.
Emma Gray→The ISBL Operational Excellence Framework, launched with The Key, gives schools a practical structure for improving the systems behind teaching and learning. What it is, what is in it for a business leader, and where to start.
Emma Gray→1st Pillar's first official month, the decisions that arrive all at once, the people who made it possible, and the belief the business was founded on, that a child is educated by the whole school community.
Emma Gray→A new circuit studio at the local gym turns out to be a fair description of the school business leader's job. You do not have to excel at every station, but you do have to hold your own on all of them, and nobody does it alone.
Emma Gray→Raising children and caring for elderly parents turn out to have more in common than expected, and neither comes with a manual. On trusting the people who do the work at both ends of life, and on the practicality the job teaches you.
Emma Gray→What the Academy Trust Handbook requires of internal scrutiny, how the programme is planned with the audit and risk committee, what it can cover, and what the year-end report to the DfE must contain.
Emma Gray→Where the name came from, and a first manifesto for what school business leaders could change if they spoke with one voice: funding that follows the pupil, estates brought up to a basic standard, and every role in a school properly recognised.
Emma Gray→Emma's series for Edexec on the thinking behind good school business leadership: an hour a week, a structured method, and a different problem each time.