We work with Government departments, agencies, awarding organisations and frontline education institutions to transform educational outcomes..
We’re incredibly passionate about the power of education - to change the lives of young people and adults, to help strengthen and bring communities together, to improve and help to grow businesses of all sizes, and to help solve the nation’s longstanding productivity challenges. We’re at our very best when working with clients to identify new ways to solve entrenched education issues; and, we love nothing more than seeing our strategic thinking through into delivery and benefits realisation.
Our team includes colleagues who have worked as senior officials in the Department for Education and what is now the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA), in the nation’s leading awarding organisations, and as senior leaders of frontline institutions. Their personal experience, technical expertise and insight enable us to provide clients with uniquely valuable advice and support.
For example, Matt Hamnett was a senior official in the Department for Education, built a large national training provision within a FTSE50 BPO organisation, and was CEO of a diversified education group before founding the firm - through which he has advised all of the key players in the tertiary system.
James Sowray was a senior operations leader in several of the nation’s largest training providers, building Ofsted outstanding pre-employment and apprenticeship provisions, before he joined the firm. He has since built a deep, strategic and operational, understanding of awarding - and has supported some of the most complex, pressured, programmes in the sector over the last four years.
Gemma Gronland is an expert in curriculum, qualifications and assessment who holds a masters in education from Harvard University. A trained teacher, she leads the firm’s growing curriculum, qualification and assessment design team - which operates in the UK and West Africa.
We have the expertise required to support education sector clients with your most complex and technical work…
We have built a team with the combination of capabilities and expertise required to support education sector clients from strategy, through transformation and delivery to learners, including:
Public policy: helping colleagues in Government consider how you can best deliver Government’s missions, including by providing you with our insights about how the sector works from a leadership, commercial, qualification and curriculum perspective.
Commercial strategy: helping clients make genuine, integrated, choices about where you play, how you differentiate, and what transformation is required to realise your goals - including exploration of entry to new parts of the market, and acquisition opportunities.
Transformation and operations: helping clients define and execute complex transformation efforts, including where they require technical sector expertise. For example we do a huge amount of work on the transformation of awarding and assessment operations.
Programme and change management: helping clients in Government and the wider sector to scope, mobilise and lead change and service delivery programmes - including those which involve curriculum, compliance and assessment activities.
Digital and data-driven innovation: helping clients in all parts of the sector explore how emerging tech, including but not limited to AI, could transform your operations - and the outcomes you facilitate for learners, employers and communities. We happily coinvest in research and development work with clients who share our interests.
Qualifications and assessment: providing product strategy advice to clients in Government and awarding organisations; and helping awarding clients to develop new and review existing qualifications, assessments and learning resources, through all phases and product types.
Curriculum and compliance: helping clients assure and enhance curriculum quality, including by helping you to design and embed new quality assurance and improvement models; helping you establish strong funding compliance arrangements; and, supporting the resolution of substantial compliance issues - working with the ESFA.
We’re grateful that clients have trusted us to support them with some fascinating, challenging and impactful pieces of work…
We don’t shout about individual pieces of work that we have done with clients; we’re here to help, not to claim to credit for what is always our clients’ success. Some anonymised examples of the work that we have done include:
Market strategy: we have worked with several corporate clients to help them consider whether and how they might work in the education sector. In each case, we have provided clear, compelling advice on how our client might leverage their distinct capabilities and differentiators to establish a sustainable operation in the sector whilst providing progressive, high quality, learning experiences.
Specialist due diligence: we were engaged by a private equity client to conduct sector specialist due diligence on a large apprenticeship training provider. We leveraged our commercial, curriculum and compliance expertise to provide them with a granular view of the target organisation’s strengths, issues and risks - informing both our client’s decision to proceed, and their integration plan.
Provider transformation: we were engaged by a large, national, specialist apprenticeship training provider to help it address serious quality and compliance issues - and transform its operating model and ways of working for the long term. Working on an embedded basis, we delivered substantial improvements across all headline performance indicators whilst building a next gen operation.
Programme management: we have worked with several of the UK’s leading awarding organisations to provide them with expert programme and operations management support - including with their core awarding cycle, during and in the two years following the pandemic. Our combination of programme, operations and awarding expertise enabled us to support timely, compliant, awarding in all cases.
Awarding innovation: we have completed research and development projects with awarding clients, focussed on how data science and emerging tech could transform qualification and assessment design processes and wider awarding operations.
Qualification design: we have worked with some of the nation’s largest awarding organisations to support the development of large, complex, qualification suites - including new T Levels; and, work with a range of awarding clients to help them review and improve existing qualifications at pace, so they can preserve the relevance of and revenue generation from their current portfolio.
Curriculum: we have worked with a wide range of apprenticeship and skills training providers, including universities delivering higher and degree apprenticeships, to provide them with robust, evidenced and insightful advice on the quality of their provision - and how they can improve it. We have also supported several of our clients through Ofsted inspection, working on an embedded basis.
