43. Can we save the post-covid schooling crisis with THIS AI tool? | Phillippa De’Ath

Summary

Podcast Summary

Podcast: James Reed: All About Business
Episode 43: Can we save the post-covid schooling crisis with THIS AI tool? | Philippa De’Ath
Date: September 15, 2025
Host: James Reed
Guest: Philippa De’Ath, Co-founder & Chief Revenue Officer, Arbor Education

---

Episode Overview

This episode features an in-depth conversation between James Reed and Philippa De’Ath, co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer of Arbor Education, a leading EdTech company in the UK. They explore how advanced management information systems and AI-driven tools are transforming administrative processes in schools, lightening the load on teachers, supporting school leadership, and reshaping the future of education in the wake of the pandemic. Philippa shares her journey—from founding schools in Hackney to building Arbor into the top MIS provider—and discusses entrepreneurship, the challenges of scaling school technology, and the broader role of data and AI in education reform.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What Does Arbor Education Do? (00:55–04:35)

• Arbor Overview:

  • Arbor provides a management information system (MIS) for schools ("B2B SaaS ERP system") to streamline data management and back office operations, removing admin from teachers’ and schools’ plates.
  • Philippa: "Our mission is to really transform the way this work gets done in schools... we're about taking all of that admin off their plates." [02:00]
  • Handles everything from attendance and behaviour to parental communications and payments.

• Scale and Market Penetration:

  • Over 10,000 UK schools use Arbor, with another 1,000 onboarding soon—nearly half the market.
  • About 24,000 schools in the UK total [03:14].

---

2. Why Cloud and AI Matter in Schools (05:26–08:22)

• Legacy vs. Cloud-Based Systems:

  • Traditional MIS are locked down, siloed, and inaccessible to central teams.
  • Cloud has enabled real-time access, transformational particularly during/after the pandemic.
  • Philippa: "Schools are way behind how you would expect to work in a business." [05:32]

• AI Implementation:

  • Arbor integrates AI in several ways:
    • Ask Arbor: A natural language query tool for data insights ("What's the attendance rate for boys today compared to national average?") [06:38–06:47]
    • Auto Absence: AI-driven attendance management, reducing manual processing from 90 min to 15–20 min a day [07:04–08:07]
    • AI-Driven Translation: Multilingual parental communications to reach diverse families [08:55]

• Impact:

  • Frees admin time to allow improved parent engagement and quicker responses to absence or issues.

---

3. Real-Time School Management and Benchmarking (10:00–12:00)

• For Academy Trust Leaders:
  • Centralized visibility for multi-school organizations via Arbor; real-time data on attendance, staff, and benchmarking against national trends.
  • Philippa: "We can offer really good statistical benchmarking data back to school leaders." [11:23]
  • Helps schools see not just internal data but broader context ("Is my school late after the football match, or is everyone?”) [11:41]

---

4. Entrepreneurial Education & The Importance of 'Oracy' (13:09–17:19)

• Fostering Entrepreneurship in Schools:

  • Entrepreneurship is linked to confidence and communication, not just subject knowledge.
  • Most state schools do not teach students to speak confidently (oracy).
  • Philippa: "What they don't do so well is teach you to really speak confidently...if you can't articulate why you're excited about it, it's not going to carry you very far." [15:06]
  • Extra-curriculars and creative education (like drama) often develop these crucial skills.

• AI’s Impact on Inquiry:

  • The rise of AI requires people to frame effective questions—another aspect of communication and curiosity.
  • Philippa: "You’ve got to learn how to speak or to query in a really different way as well. And that's a new set of skills we all have to learn." [16:52]

---

5. Personal Entrepreneurial Journey: Founding Schools & Arbor (17:31–31:02)

• Unique Schooling Background:

  • Philippa's experience at an entrepreneurial, family-run school inspired her inclination to found Hackney New Primary and Waterside Academy.
  • Philippa: "We thought it was okay to just like set up a school in a kitchen... The free schools program was kind of exactly that." [19:36]

• Challenges of Starting Schools:

  • Free Schools Programme saw communities pitch and establish schools with little guidance—Philippa describes "cowboy land" and the huge workload from hiring heads to designing buildings.
  • Philippa: “We wrote what then became a sort of 500 page proposal, got a thousand...signatures” [22:56]
  • Successfully opened Hackney New Primary and Waterside Academy.

• Genesis of Arbor:

  • Came from dissatisfaction with legacy school admin systems while founding schools: “I was thinking, oh, you know, maybe I can make one. I don't know how to go about doing that, but I've just made a school, so I probably can do that as well.” [28:06]
  • Joined Arbor as employee/customer #4, contributing as the company built the product from concept.

---

6. Growth, Ambitions & Vision (31:02–34:20)

• Ambitions:

  • Expand across the remaining half of UK schools, Wales, and Scotland.
  • International expansion, especially with small island nations or government-wide contracts.
  • Recent acquisitions: HR platform, staff development tools, and new workflow automation.

• Company Stats:

  • 420 employees, locations in London, Leeds, Lincoln, India, Serbia, and remote [32:37].

---

7. The Teacher/Admin Crisis & Big Picture (34:20–38:59)

• Teacher Burden Post-Covid:

  • Heavy stress and disengagement across the sector—AI seen as a relief for admin, but not a threat to actual teaching roles.
  • Philippa: "The administrative burden, like no one's saying we don't need administrators in schools, but maybe some of that admin could be done by the robot” [35:09]

• Role of Data & Cooperation:

  • Data is crucial for joined-up provision across education, health, social care—yet inter-agency cooperation is lagging behind technological possibilities.
  • Philippa: "Having a joined up ecosystem in public sector...it's not a technology barrier, but it is a cooperation barrier." [37:42]

---

8. Efficiency, Productivity & School Funding (38:59–43:22)

• How Arbor Helps Schools:
  • Facilitates funding audits, improves parental engagement, saves time and money (£5,000+/year for a primary school), and enables better top-down management from academy trusts.
  • Philippa: “A better run organization tends to attract more people to it.” [41:04]
  • Set and distribute assessment policies, centralize governance, and reduce duplication of work.

---

9. The Joy of Good EdTech & Future Recruitment (43:29–44:41)

• Aim for Joy in Use:

  • Arbor wants to be "a joy to use,” improving teacher morale ("little bit of joy, maybe that means you're going to be a slightly happier teacher in the classroom" [43:29]).

• Recruitment Tools:

  • Launching applicant tracking system and job boards, seeking a “full lifecycle view” from staff hiring to career development [44:31–45:03].

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "Every day in Arbor is a school day... I like that what we do is quite hard... but we're nowhere near done."
  — Philippa De’Ath [45:58]

• "You’ve got to learn how to speak or to query in a really different way as well. And that's a new set of skills we all have to learn."
  — Philippa De’Ath [16:52]

• "I was employee number four and also customer number four, as it turned out...I thought they'd already finished building this whole system and I was just kind of joining.”
  — Philippa De’Ath [29:15]

• "What schools do well is teach you chemistry or a lot of facts...what they don't do so well is teach you to really speak confidently."
  — Philippa De’Ath [15:06]

• "I want Arbor to be a joy to use. That ultimately, if you're a teacher, when you open your laptop, you're thinking, 'cool,' instead of, 'ugh.'"
  — Philippa De’Ath [43:29]

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:55–04:35: Arbor intro & market position
• 05:26–08:22: Cloud, AI tools & parental engagement
• 10:00–12:00: Trust leader/CEO dashboard, benchmarking
• 13:09–17:19: Oracy, entrepreneurship, the need for communication skills
• 17:31–31:02: Philippa’s schooling, founding Hackney schools, and joining Arbor
• 31:02–34:20: Growth ambitions & international expansion
• 34:20–38:59: Teacher/admin challenges, multi-agency data, inter-operations
• 38:59–43:22: Arbor’s impact on funding, efficiency, productivity
• 43:29–44:41: Edtech as 'joy,' recruitment and staff lifecycle tools
• 45:25–46:55: Rapid-fire questions: what drives Philippa, 5-year vision

---

For Further Information

• Visit arboreducation.com
• Check out Arbor's events and webinars (e.g., Arborfest)
• Connect for MAT (multi-academy trust) leader webinars and resources

---

Tone:
A candid, practical, and optimistic discussion focused on actionable insights, with a blend of humor and realism.
Recommendation:
Highly recommended for school leaders, EdTech professionals, and anyone interested in the intersection of education, technology, and entrepreneurship.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to All About Business with me, James Reed, the podcast that covers everything about business management and leadership. What role does data play in shaping smarter, more equitable education? And how can we use that technology to reduce the burden on schools and help educators focus on what matters most, teaching and learning? Joining me today on All About Business is Philippa Diab, co founder and Chief Revenue Officer at Arbor Education, an innovative edtech company transforming how thousands of schools across England operate day to day. With deep experience in scaling mission led organizations, Philippa shares practical insights on the future of school technology, the power of data informed policy and what it takes to build impactful public private partnerships in education. Well, today on All About Business, I couldn't be more delighted than to welcome Philippa Dia from from Arbor Education. Philippa is co founder of Arbor Education. She's also founded two schools in the London borough of Hackney and she is the Chief Revenue Officer of Arbor Education as well. And Philippa, I'm going to have to start by just asking a very simple question. What does Arbor Education do and what are the problems you're seeking to address through this business service?

[B]

Thank you. Thanks for having me today as well. So Arbor is a management information system for Schools, which is B2B SaaS, ERP system in Techspeak, which basically means we help schools to manage not just their data but all their back office work.

[A]

Hang on, hang on. I love all those acronyms. B2B business to business to business, SaaS, software as a service.

[B]

That's right, ERP.

[A]

Let me get it. Enterprise Resource. Enterprise Resource Planning System.

[B]

Exactly, exactly.

[A]

All right, so there's a lot going on there.

[B]

It's like the main database, it's the main way in which you share information, get work done in the school. And our mission is to really transform the way this work gets done in schools. So we're not about curriculum, we're not about kind of giving teachers more ideas about what to teach, but we are about taking all of that admin off their plates.

[A]

So they must love you. I mean, because I always hear that teachers are overburdened by admin. How's it going?

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

As the Chief Revenue Officer, are they going well?

[B]

They are going super well. So luckily for me, but luckily for all of us, we've been growing 40% plus year on year and we've just become the market leader in the UK for provision of management information systems to schools. So that means we're the main sort of supplier to the school office, the school leaders and teachers on all of that information about attendance Behavior, how their parents are, communication with parents, people paying for lunch, all that kind of management of the school.

[A]

So you're the market leader. Well done.

[B]

Thank you.

[A]

How many schools are we talking about here? Just so people understand the scale of.

[B]

This, there's just under 10,000 schools live on Arbor today and we've got another thousand or so coming on board over the next few months.

[A]

And how many schools are there in the UK? How big's the market?

[B]

24,000.

[A]

So you've got almost half the market.

[B]

Yeah, almost half.

[A]

And you've got half to go.

[B]

Yeah, exactly.

[A]

And is there an advantage of lots of schools being on the same platform? Do they. Do they share information or not?

[B]

Yeah, they do. So. So whether you're a group of schools. Schools. School work. Schools work better in groups. Right. So whether that's a group of schools in a local authority, like in Hackney, or a group of schools in an academy trust, they. That collaborating allows them to share resources, potentially share staff, and just kind of share the burden of running schools, which are really, really hard things to run. And so our system allows both the school itself, that information really to go from the kind of the teacher to the central leadership team. There's often a chief executive that runs a group of schools with sort of many tens of millions of budgets and thousands of staff. So they're really complex, kind of quite commercial organizations, academy trusts. And that's really been. The growth of academy trusts has sort of spurred the growth of Arbor as well.

[A]

So that's where you began, really. Were they the first ones to say, hey, we're interested?

[B]

Yeah. I mean, we started back in sort of 2012, which was a kind of new era of government academies program and the free schools program. And I'm the founder of two free schools that really kind of spurred a lot of innovation, you know, for good or ill. But there was a lot of change at that time in UK education.

[A]

So this is during the coalition government.

[B]

Yeah, like coalition into. It was real, like some Michael Gove era of. And that, you know, academies were sort of labour. Labour plans, particularly in Hackney. But. And it is much more political in education than I thought it would be. But this is really about kind of decision making. So. So academy trusts have the full responsibility for their schools. And so to do that, like, if you're running a business, you need to have all the information about your institutions available at your fingertips. That's really hard to do with the legacy system that still, you know, nearly half of the schools in England still use because they. The data is Locked in a server in a school office, only a couple of people have access to it. If you're in a central team, you're the CEO, you can't access that data easily, and so you don't really know what's going on. And therefore you can't improve what's going on.

[A]

But your system is different because you use, and this is key, I believe, the cloud.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And people can then dial it up.

[B]

Yeah. And I mean, whether you talk about, you know, the cloud or AI or any other technical revolution like schools haven't, you know, schools are way behind how you would expect to work in a business. Right. So, you know, the way that we might exchange information using Google or Microsoft or whatever you're using. Schools have only just caught up on that because of the pandemic, which kind of made everyone realize why cloud access is so important because you don't have to be in the building to do things. But still, not everybody's there. And we still are sometimes having to reassure customers that it's okay to use and access their data though, online. Right. So that it's secure and easily accessible and those things. So let alone would you like to use AI to transform how you run your school? Like that's. We've.

[A]

How are you getting on with that? Are people doing that?

[B]

Yeah. Well, this is.

[A]

What are the transformations that you see as possible?

[B]

So we launched AI to all of our customers in a few different ways. So we have a little tool called Ask Arbor that allows you to use like natural language questions to start to query the data. So you don't have to build a complex data report.

[A]

You can just ask, so what sort of question?

[B]

Like, how am I? What's the attendance rate for boys in my school today compared to the national average? And you could type that kind of question.

[A]

How many days has James Reid missed this term?

[B]

Exactly. It could be that specific, maybe too many. And how is James doing compared to all the other James?

[A]

This is really alarming. I can see. Very helpful for teachers.

[B]

You are on time today, so don't worry.

[A]

Thanks for pointing that out to our listeners. And so were you.

[B]

Um, and then. And then back in the summer, we launched something called Auto Absence, which is an AI agent based. But it's really again, for attendance, for a parent to ring the school to say, actually James is sick today, he's not going to be in. In the old model, a school business, you know, an admin in the school office would have to listen to that message, write it on a post it note, enter into a system do 20 other things. And if there's 30, 40 kids absent and there's a huge problem with absence in England still post parents since the pandemic, really, really, really problematic. If you're not in school, you know nothing else is going to happen. And so making it easier for parents not only to tell their school that their kid might not come in that day, but also for the school to do something about it is really crucial. And so auto absence takes that message. It kind of triggers some workflows to allow the school office to go from something that on average was taking 90 minutes to now take 15, 20 minutes, which means they can start speaking to parents more quickly and actually having better dialogue with parents to school, they'd call.

[A]

The parent back, would they?

[B]

Yeah. So they can then like, you know, rank by problem and get in touch with that parent instead of just listening to messages and not being able to do anything about it.

[A]

So that's one good example of how the system supports schools.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Have you got some others you could share?

[B]

Yeah, I think, I mean, parent engagement is a really big thing. So there's over 3 million parents now use Arbor Appa apps on that.

[A]

So what do they do on that?

[B]

They pay for lunch. They see, you know, whether James was.

[A]

Late or not, they can buy lunch on there.

[B]

Yeah. So there's a big kind of payments processing part system as well, so. Or also, I guess in Apple take.

[A]

A percent of the school lunch.

[B]

Doesn'T take a percentage, but you've got Apple and Google Pay and it means it's easier for parents to kind of stay, stay in touch with school and for schools to see which parents are actually engaged with the messages. So schools send out text messages, emails, letters in lunch bags and all of that stuff. It's really hard for them to stay in touch with the harder to reach parents. And now we've got again, sort of AI driven translation. So if you've got a school where there are four major languages, which is like not abnormal in certain parts of the country, you can really quickly translate messages and the app. Yeah. And so everybody's getting things in the format that makes most sense to them most quickly.

[A]

I had no idea. This is amazing. So this is sort of informing parents in real time what's going on.

[B]

Yeah, exactly.

[A]

Children at school.

[B]

Exactly. I think the other thing that, I.

[A]

Mean, I have to ask, are there other competitors doing this?

[B]

Yeah, yeah, there are. I'm not going to name them on this podcast.

[A]

No, I wasn't going to ask you to do that.

[B]

But There is plenty of choice in the market.

[A]

There is choice. Yeah.

[B]

So, yeah. And I think the other thing for us, like any platform is making sure that where there are other applications that, you know, apps that might be, like curriculum content for teachers that they can work really well with Arbor. So arba's kind of the main platform, but you can buy it in other systems and connect with our system and.

[A]

Right. So the curriculum would be on a different end.

[B]

Yeah. Right, yeah.

[A]

Yours is the sort of administration information.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

Management.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

Right. What else can it do?

[B]

It can. So if you're the CEO of Academy, an academy trust that has 40 schools, which is sort of an.

[A]

That's a lot.

[B]

Well, yeah, that's kind of the optimum size probably for you to be able to know who all of the head teachers are or have enough budget to be able to start to kind of centralize a bit, maybe get some economies of scale. If you are in that role, you can see in real time what's happening in all of your schools. And Arbor, and that just works on day one, so you don't have to employ, you know, a day.

[A]

When you say you can see in real time, what would you be looking at?

[B]

So you can see headcount. I use attendance because it's a neat. The data is really good quality. But you can see how attendance is doing. You know how.

[A]

Or pupil and teacher attendance.

[B]

Yes, both. Exactly. And not only for your school, but also how that compares to the national picture as well. So because we've got a big enough set of data now, and this is one thing that comes from the benefit of ARBA being a major provider, is that we can offer really good statistical benchmarking data back to school leaders. So I can see what's my free school meal, boys attendance today compared to the national picture, compared to schools like me this morning. And if I'm seeing, hey, there was a big football match last night and like, loads of the kids stayed up late to watch it, and now they're all late in today. Is that just in my school or is that in all schools? And is that something I should act on or something I just have to weather?

[A]

If, like me, you run a business or manage a team, you'll know how important it is to hire great people. Over the last 65 years, Reid has worked with thousands of businesses around the world, helping them to recruit and to grow. This is what inspired us to create Read AI, your new AI hiring agent. It's here to save you money, to save you time, and to help you get the right match. Whether you're hiring your first team member or your 50th, read AI is here to make it easier. Try it free for 28 days, exclusively available during our beta period. Go to Read AI and get started. Read AI your higher power. Philippa, you mentioned that you went to an unusual school yourself, which seemed to throw out a lot of entrepreneurial energy and entrepreneurs. And it's interesting to me that listening to you, because a lot of our guests on the podcast who are entrepreneurs, I think it's fair to say, did not shine at school, said that quite openly, and that's often a pattern. And I'm thinking, you know a lot about schools. You see a lot of data.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Well, what needs to happen for schools to encourage more entrepreneurs? Because these people make a huge difference to our society and to the future of our economy, and we want more entrepreneurs, not less.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

What's going on? What could be done to make that more likely?

[B]

I mean, I guess to be the entrepreneurial spirits? Probably there's been way too far, too many books written about what that means, but for me, it's sort of confidence, your ability to speak about whatever it is that you're excited about and bring other people along with you, and to a certain degree, being confident before it's finished. So, you know, your products won't be ready on the day when you have to sell your product, so you've got to be able to kind of project that. What schools do quite well, potentially, is teach you chemistry or a lot of facts or, you know, some dates in history, or potentially how to spell quite well, although that even doesn't seem to be a focus anymore. But what they don't do so well is teach you to really speak confidently. I think that's something that you get, you know, if you go to public school in England, that's exactly what you expect to come out with. But for most state school kids, they're not getting that kind of support. And I was, you know, I was at school, had exactly the same experience as another free school founder, but he had also gone to drama school. So we both had the same chemistry lessons, the same maths lessons. But his outsider school extracurricular kind of allowed him to get that stage presence, which ultimately allowed him to stand up in front of groups of parents and started school. He's now started a university. I think there's this kind of real ability to just speak confidently, whether that's in your first job interview or on a stage or to parents in a local community center. As I Had to do for the school. Like you can be taught those skills and often children are not taught them and they're sort of, you know, you inherit them if you're lucky to grow up in a household where your parents speak to you like that. But.

[A]

So you might be good at maths but if you can't communicate.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

It's not going to carry you very far. Exactly.

[B]

You're not going to get a job in a bank if you're brilliant at maths. But you can't articulate why it is that you're excited about it. So it. So that there's a big focus now on oracy in schools and so it's called oracy.

[A]

What's that mean?

[B]

Your ability to speak really. To a rate. Yeah.

[A]

To hold a room.

[B]

To hold a room, yeah. Which is I think is not just about being a great after dinner speaker but being able to kind of go in and ask for what you want or to articulate what you might be good at or what you're interested in doing.

[A]

And.

[B]

And that takes practice.

[A]

And that's not in the curriculum.

[B]

It's not. They're keen. Still I can't speak, which is an irony.

[A]

Across.

[B]

I was never taught honesty.

[A]

You're getting your message across. Keep going.

[B]

You. Some schools are putting in place programs to really drive oracy. So to have teachers engaged in bringing students to speak about their work as much as write it down, to debate and to defend their work in arguments. And I think I work with a lot of people who have had creative education. So I had a scientific degree. I didn't ever have to do that kind of crit. Whereas you talk to architects or creatives, people who've studied fashion design. They have to present their work and talk about it in front of their peers. I think that kind of thing, having to defend yourself verbally is a pretty useful day to day skill, but it's not something that very many people get the chance to learn at school. Yeah.

[A]

It's interesting. More and more important I think as technology advances because computers even talks, you know.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So to be able to communicate well verbally.

[B]

Exactly. I think this. The one of the things that AI is forcing us to do is to think about how we ask questions. So you're a professional interviewer, so you're getting really good at asking questions. But most people don't know how to articulate a really good question that gets them to prompt the AI to give them the thing that they're looking for. And so you've got to learn how to speak or to query in a really different way as well. And that's a new set of skills we all have to learn.

[A]

I think that's quite exciting because it almost goes back to the beginning when all the stories were sort of told.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And the sort of fireplace and.

[B]

Yeah, exactly.

[A]

And. And the history was an oral history.

[B]

I think that's one really optimistic view of. What does AI mean? It means we can get back to talking to each other more because we're not having to just deal with the paperwork. You can actually get back to conversation and kind of creative discussion as well. So I grew up in rural Leicestershire. My mum and dad ran a pub. My mum's especially was quite entrepreneurial. She had a few different businesses and things. And I was going to a local primary school and they just sort of changed how they were going to run the school. And so she was looking for somewhere else for me to go to school because, I mean, I was basically a total swat, even at the age of six or seven.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And so she started looking at this school and it's called Twycross. It got started by two retired headteachers, so they've been headteachers in Birmingham. They'd moved to Leicestershire, bought this old vicarage, and they'd realized that, like, lots of local kids, farmers kids and various things that were all going miles away to go to school. So they started bringing them in. And I think they started in, like, 1988, 89, maybe a little bit earlier. And. And literally they would teach. You know, she would teach history and Latin and he would teach chemistry and maths. And then they sort of evolved and hired a few other teachers over time. And then by the time I joined that school, there was the vicarage, and then they bought a little cottage down the road and they bought a little house across the street. And so. And now almost the whole village is the school. It's kind of amazing. It's become this really kind of serious institution. But at the time, you know, our English lesson was in the headmistress's mother's cottage and they'd moved her bedroom, so we had our English lessons in there. So it was really kind of like being in a country house, but very family and very entrepreneurial. And as a result of that, there are at least four Edtech founders and two school founders that come from that.

[A]

Same school village in Leicestershire.

[B]

And not because we set up an alumni program, but just like, coincidentally or.

[A]

Not coincidentally as it.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. With the. I guess it was in. You know, we thought it was okay to just like set up a school in a kitchen and. And the free schools program was kind of exactly that. It was about.

[A]

So you. So you then followed the example of these two head teachers who taught you.

[B]

A bit later and set up.

[A]

Well, you said two schools. So tell me about that. That was in Hackney, was it?

[B]

Yeah, in Hackney. So. So I studied natural sciences at Cambridge. Sort of expected that as a result of that someone would just show up and give me a job. And that's obviously not what actually happened. So I kind of.

[A]

I'm amazed. Why not?

[B]

Yeah, I know. I don't know. So I was like back in Leicestershire thinking, what the hell am I going to do with a physics degree? And I thought this was like 2002. I thought, I'll go and work in it because that, you know, it's a bit sciency, it's a bit commercial. It was extremely on call. And I joined IBM in the graduate program in quite a technical role. And then I trained in sales, I was a channel manager and then I moved into the management consulting team in IBM. So I was doing that and then I'd been there for about nine years, got pregnant, was on my very well paid maternity leave. When my baby was born, I nearly died the week after.

[A]

You nearly died?

[B]

I nearly died, yeah. I had a big blood clot and I think that made me kind of think, do I really want to keep having my life in the way?

[A]

Really?

[B]

Do I want to go back to corporate role? Yeah, I had a big epiphany. Yeah. And I'd always been interested in teaching, you know, science teaching, math teaching. And the free school program started around that time and I was talking with a friend who was a violinist and we were kind of having a sort of fantasy conversation about, well, imagine if we started a school where I would teach maths and physics and she would teach, you know, Russian and violin. And then we met a third person, Andreas, who had written a sort of 50 page version of what he thought one of these schools could look like. And so we all kind of met really at the right time from different angles. And so he and I worked really closely to take that forward, to get all of the community engagement. So, so my friend Sharma Dean, whose book is just behind me, she and.

[A]

One of our former guests, so she was there as well.

[B]

The school is across from her shop, her first shop.

[A]

Oh, okay. So there's a lot of entrepreneurial energy in this area.

[B]

Exactly. So it'd be like with my baby, she'd be with her baby. Can I go and find loads of mums? So we'd be like getting loads of forms and going in, you know, getting people to sign up and so they'd send their kid to a school. The first school that we wanted to set up was a secondary school. And that's really. Because we just thought that was. There was a bigger need for a different kind of a high school in Hackney. So it wasn't about our kids, it was much more about building something meaningful, which turned out to be really, really hard. But we had this kind of very strong music focus, a slightly longer school day, so there was more time to kind of do music, but also, you know, do your maths, do your homework, dance.

[A]

So this was the secondary school. So you did a primary and a secondary school?

[B]

Yeah, we did the secondary school first.

[A]

And why was it really hard? I'm not suggesting it shouldn't be, but I want to understand what was hard.

[B]

Well, so the free schools program was like total cowboy land, right? So the government Department for Education led by Michael Gove, basically said, we think community groups, charities should be able to take public funding and set up a school and you can come to us and basically pitch your idea and if we think it's good enough and you've got enough community support, then we'll back it. So we wrote what then became a sort of 500 page proposal, got a thousand, I think 1200 signatures from parents and local businesses and support and so on, pitched it to Department for Education and they said, yeah, great, you know, you're an impressive bunch and we think this is going to work really well. Hackney is an area that needs a bit. So far so good, so far so good. So that was all great. What they didn't say was, here's how you do it. So there's. There were no guides on how you do it. So you literally had to go, okay, well now we have to hire a team and then we have to. So you have to hire a head.

[A]

So what did you do? What did you. Who do you hire first?

[B]

The head teacher?

[A]

Yeah, that's what I'd have done.

[B]

Yeah. We had an amazing founding head teacher who had sort of, sort of wanted to retire but wasn't quite ready to in it, so. So she and I worked really closely together. I sort of went back to IBM a little bit, asked for a flexible working allowance so I could work on the school, got it sort of slightly rejected and instead I asked for a sabbatical for a year, which I did get. So that paid for me to work on the school for free for. For another year.

[A]

And so they gave you a paid sabbatical?

[B]

Yeah, for a year. I was like quarter salary or something. But still.

[A]

Yeah, you're getting something. So IBM were pretty good, really?

[B]

Yeah, they were pretty good. They were really good. They were. I wrote a very nice thank you letter.

[A]

Well, it's nice to hear that, you know, when a company does well and you.

[B]

Yeah, no, they really relationship with them. Yeah. You know, you put in 10 years of service and you're well looked after. So I'm hugely grateful to them for all of my experiences and yeah, we had to build the building, so then we had to appoint an architect. We had to argue to be given an architect even, because the Department of Education were like, well, you can just, you know, here's a identikit school building, which we didn't really agree with. We had to find the land, get the DfE to agree to buy the land, like everything. Like we're starting a business from scratch. Same. But starting a school, finding land and.

[A]

Getting buildings built in.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Hard, busy parts of London isn't easy.

[B]

It's not easy. So we sort of met up with a local developer who had already had planning permission for a building and then decided instead to work with us to change that into a school. But yeah, it was like hugely complicated.

[A]

So this, this began in what, 2012, did you say?

[B]

2011? We started on that, yeah.

[A]

And when was the school opened?

[B]

When the first secondary school opened in 2013. September 2013, yeah, that was way too quick.

[A]

Too quick, yeah.

[B]

So we started just with year sevens. So the first year of secondary school in a temporary building with like, everything was temporary, but it was quite fun and I think for those kids, also a kind of incredible entrepreneurial experience. I think it got harder later on. You know, we had some staff issues and various things and so it was kind of a struggle to maintain that early, you know, startup vibe, really. And then the primary school, so Boris Johnson was selling off all of the fire stations. One was across the street from us and we sort of semi joked, oh, we could kind of get the Department of Education to buy that for us and open a primary school. And then I wrote them a nice email and I made a logo of the school and I put it on the fire station and sent them a picture and said, would you like to come and have a chat with us about this as a potential primary school site? And, you know, as the atmosphere was at that time, the building's inspector came out and we had a chat and then we put in a proposal and got the community support and got the agreement for the primary school. But which. Which we then had all of our experience from the secondary school to take into the primary. So the primary school was and still is a really exceptional school.

[A]

So what's that called, that primary school?

[B]

Hackney New Primary School.

[A]

Hackney New Primary School.

[B]

And the secondary school, it's called Waterside Academy, right? Yeah. Because it's on a canal basin.

[A]

Fantastic. So they're still up and running now, but, I mean, it takes. Well, they say it takes 20 years for an overnight success or something. So, I mean, anything takes a bit of time to grow and flourish. Yeah, but it was while you were doing that, I understand, that you thought, we need some help with the admin.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. So one of the things I had to buy for the school on my list was a management information system and I thought, I think that's an ERP system. I know what that is because I've done a lot of work on that in IBM. So I'd worked on the biggest ERP rollout in the world for Shell. I worked there for, like, three or four years doing that as a consultant and lots of other things, oil and gas and government clients. And I thought, whatever it is that people are selling to schools is going to be shit, because nearly everything else that is being sold, tech, furniture, you name it, overpriced and it's not very good. Yeah. Which is a different kind of public sector procurement thing. But. So I was thinking, oh, you know, maybe I can make one. I don't know how to go about doing that, but I've just made a school, so I probably can do that as well.

[A]

Make your own enterprise.

[B]

And then I met James and Emil. I was introduced.

[A]

So they're your business partners?

[B]

Yeah. And they had started. They'd started looking at how do you make it easier for schools to use their data? Because schools have millions of bits of data. Governor's reports, Department of Education reports, Ofsted reports. How do you turn that into something more usable? So that's how we kind of came together.

[A]

And was it already called Arbor Education when you.

[B]

It was called Arbor or Education. Yeah.

[A]

So that wasn't the name you chose?

[B]

No.

[A]

You don't know why they chose.

[B]

Was an era of startups having names that sounded, like, a bit familiar but also, like, a bit odd.

[A]

All right.

[B]

And it also sounds slightly academic and it hasn't.

[A]

That's what it sounds like. It's. Yeah.

[B]

At the top of the ranking in the Alphabet, all these things Help.

[A]

Sounds like a tree.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

So there was a lot of thought that went into that. By someone.

[B]

Yeah. By James. Yeah.

[A]

Was it? Yeah. So that's good.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So when, when you join them.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

What, how developed was it?

[B]

So I was employee number four and also customer number four, as it turned out. So I thought they did a good pitch on me. I thought they'd already finished building this whole system and I was just kind of joining.

[A]

So the sales end was ahead and.

[B]

I kind of walked into this office in Westbourne park and realized, oh my God, this is it. Like I've gone from working from the world, one of the world's biggest tech companies in IBM via this school startup, into this room which had really nice desks and beautiful lighting but like otherwise not very much coming out of it. And you know, the product wasn't ready. Like it wasn't even.

[A]

So it was a concept, really.

[B]

It was a concept which we then started building. Yeah.

[A]

Right. So you were involved in the building of it as well?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, I can't believe I was kind of. I'd had to do all the setup of the school. So I was kind of the one employee who knew what it was like to be a guy. Yeah. Who was a customer as well, which was a horrible combination. You know, if you can have a.

[A]

Customer as an employee in that way, you're going to get all the information you need for the product.

[B]

I think with a. Now a more mature product, it's great. But at the time it was quite stressful.

[A]

I bet. So you had a lot going on and a young child.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

So now you, you're. What's your involvement with the schools now?

[B]

So I no longer run either of them. So we did sort of 10 years and then there's a bit of a like mergers and acquisitions in Academy Trust. So if you're little, you really want a bigger trust to take you over and kind of take on that next stage of growth. So we found a different trust to take on the schools a couple of years ago.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So yeah.

[A]

So you're full time Arbor.

[B]

Yeah, full time Arbor, which coincided just with Arbor getting even busier as going through a first exit and things like that. So.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. So what's next? I mean, where are you going to take it? What's your ambitions for the business, the service?

[B]

We, you know, we still have plenty of schools in England to bring on board. Wales, Scotland, you know, it's such a parochial business school. Schools in Lincolnshire have different needs of schools in London. So we sort of go one territory at a time. We have a couple of international customers, but I think that's, that's definitely part of looking at. They're all kind of small island nations like the Isle of Man and the Cayman Islands where all the schools in that little country use, use Arbor. But that gives us a chance to say, well, what does it mean to work with the government and all of their jurisdiction? So it's sort of small but interesting. So more of that, I think we've recently acquired a couple of other companies which provide other kind of services to schools. So we bought an HR system. So we just, we've got plenty of growth to go with the HR system. So that's again, staff development from recruitment, pensions and payroll management. So that's a new kind of segment for us. And we bought a really exciting business called Habitude, which is a kind of workflow builder, but really school specific. And so bringing that into the main core Arbor product is a big focus for the next year or so.

[A]

I mean, so you've got multiple growth tracks actually international by acquisition. Yeah, that's, that's. It sounds very ambitious. So how many people work for the company now?

[B]

420.

[A]

And where are they based?

[B]

We've got a team headquarters in London, the customer success and support team is in Leeds. The we have a team in Lincoln through an acquisition, so an office there, team in India through an acquisition in Trivandrum, Kerala, team in Serbia and, and then a lot of homes.

[A]

So you really do see sort of international as a. Yeah, big opportunity. So I mean, I suppose a school's a school ultimately.

[B]

Yeah, kind of. I think the school, we really specialize in state schools. So the way that state schools interact with government funding and other government requirements like that's where we're really strong in building that kind of big data model. So, so it's.

[A]

Most schools are state schools, aren't they?

[B]

Most schools. Well, in South America, most schools are very low cost independent schools that are, you know, run by a convent and you pay like a hundred dollars a month, that kind of thing.

[A]

All right, I didn't know that.

[B]

So yeah, India, the same. There's huge groups of low cost private schools.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So yeah, you know, Western Europe, mostly state schools, us, mostly state schools.

[A]

But yeah, but that's still a big market.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

For you to go.

[B]

Yeah, there's plenty.

[A]

So I mean, I think, I mean you were describing the sort of pressures that schools and particularly teachers are under. I've thought for a long time that teachers are heroes. Yeah, I Mean, is this, is this problem getting worse? I mean, is it getting. When you, you see it from a different perspective to most of us, you're obviously trying to sort of ease some of these pressures. But where are we headed with this? Because it worries me.

[B]

Which part particularly?

[A]

Well, the sort of stress on schools and the teachers in particular.

[B]

Yeah, I think, I mean, it's not just teachers who are like slightly disengaged with their work. There's all businesses. You talk to any business leader about their, you know, younger staff and their, you know, commitment to the career and all of those things. Like it's sort of struggle to motivate people to work generally. I think a lot of people are then on top of that we've seen worried about like, is AI going to take my job? Well, AI isn't going to take the job of a maths teacher in an English secondary school anytime soon. But there's sort of, there's these big.

[A]

Changes that teaching is a good career in terms of it's not too exposed to AI.

[B]

Yeah, I think so for sure. And I think the administrative burden, like no one's saying we don't need administrators in schools, but we're saying maybe some of that admin could be done by the robot so you can have a conversation with the parent instead of just doing the paperwork. So that will change. I think there is like at least recognition now that certainly across England and Scotland and Wales that special education needs provision needs more joined up services. And I think this is an area where technology can really help is like bringing together not just education data, but also health, social care, police, all of that data around, particularly the more vulnerable families or children, so that all of the agencies and people responsible for supporting them are kind of singing from the same hymn sheet. So that when you come to a review about somebody's autism diagnosis or somebody's, you know, neglect at home or whatever it might be, you can much more quickly get to the root of the problem with the same set of data and take action against that in a joined up way. But I think we're only just at the beginning of that being really possible across school and other services as well. But I'm kind of optimistic that people are thinking about how to solve it.

[A]

Yeah, that's certainly there as a potential objective, isn't it? It feels hard to. Feels a bit like a sort of mountain.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Hard to get to the summit of, but because there's so many different sort of people involved and so much complexity around where this data's held.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But data seems to be, you know, more and more important, but in a way harder to access.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And there are lots of rules around security and.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. I bet all the other, all the big industries, you know, education is one, but you look at like financial services or retail, all the big software vendors have had to work out how to work together really because there's kind of more money than them doing that. And having a joined up ecosystem in public sector, it's not necessarily about more money, although it might be about saving money, but it's really about improved service. And I think that there were some really big monopolistic providers in probably in public sector everywhere and they are having to kind of really change how they think and how they partner because of some of the, you know, not just the Arbours but the really big players as well are being forced to interoperate more. And that means it's not a technology barrier, but it is a cooperation barrier. And that means it is easier to, you know, share data securely than it was even five years ago. Right.

[A]

Yeah. I mean that would really. I mean there's a lot of talk about improving efficiency and productivity in the public sector through this sort of development. Yeah, it's yet to come to pass. I mean, I really hope it does. I mean, would you be interested in stepping to another level and looking at the whole thing? I mean, is that something Arbor might consider?

[B]

I think that that could be very interesting. Like I'm very aware like now we've got to this size that we are a real partner to UK schools and that we're, you know, a major part of the British school infrastructure and that brings a huge responsibility with it. And that's why this sort of flexible working research that I mentioned earlier, doing the research and presenting the results in a way that is on the side of teachers but stimulates potentially not just at a debate, but bringing together the right people around a kind of unarguably pure set of information. I think we've, we can start to change things that way. So I'm excited about that.

[A]

Yeah, I can see that. That would be transformational, potentially.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So. So if I'm running an academy and using your service.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

How does it help me access funding or support my school in.

[B]

So school funding is really based on a number of children that are in the school. That's the main, that's the main income generator. So, you know, bums on seats. So we help schools to share their data back with Department of Education to kind of validate that number. I have 400 children in my school and therefore my funding is X. So getting that right is kind of the key thing. I think the second thing is, particularly in some areas of London where lots of families have left, school roles are dropping. There's some real issues there. So schools can't generally go out and sell more seats, but they certainly need to be full in order to have their full expected budget. And so how do we help schools to better lure, lure in, better attract pupils and families while making it easier for schools to communicate with parents so that parents feel better engaged, making it easier for the school teachers and leaders to run the school if that ultimately leads to improved outcomes. Again, that attracts more parents, making it easier for schools to run other parts of their tech or manage in areas where they do save money. So on average a primary school will save over £5,000 in the first year when they move to Arbor. That's funding that they can reallocate to either pupil provision or staff salary increases or, you know, whatever they. Depending on their school governance structure, whatever they want to do with it. But like schools, schools save money as well as improving how they work by making these kind of moves. And that's just in the first year. So then they can start to evolve how they work. So I'm not saying move to Arbor and make sure that, you know, improve your school admissions as a result, but, you know, a better run organization tends to attract more people to it and be an interesting thing.

[A]

So if someone, someone listening was interested in finding you.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Where do they go? What's your.

[B]

So, so back in the day we used to have to go and visit every single school in person. Now you can meet with us online, so. But we do run a load of different events. So arboreducation.com we run Arborfest, which I mentioned is sort of 900,000 people coming each year to that conference. I run a little bit like you do, but like webinars for, for MAT leaders where we have discussions about, you know, different ways of running your trust, whether that's about governance or tech or AI policies. So I'm kind of doing things like that every month as well. So there's loads of ways.

[A]

So arbor.com is arboreducation.com harboreducation.com.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And. And so it's obviously, you know, if you're running a school, you want it to be full because.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

That means it's a thriving school.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And you also get the funding.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So you see yourselves as a key ingredient in that.

[B]

Yeah. I'd like to think that a sign of a really good school is that they're using arbor. It's like almost a, you know, a health check.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. And that. And that gives the information to the authorities that need it.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

In terms of funding.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Do you think. I mean, do you think you can help schools become more efficient so the funding goes further?

[B]

Yeah, definitely. So not just in, like, saving software licenses, but in how they work. And so that's why those things, like, how much time do you save? How much more quickly can you get information to. You know, all the decisions in schools are made ultimately by the head teacher, but in an academy trust, they're made by the academy trust central team. So the head teacher has a certain level of responsibility, a very high level of responsibility, but they don't necessarily make the decisions on staffing, curriculum and all of those things. A lot of that is done centrally. So the more we can support central teams to have not just visibility, but also the ability to set standards. So within arba, you can set your assessment policy, for example, centrally and push that into all of the schools. So you save huge amounts of work, but you also make sure that when a teacher enters a mark, marking your homework, that that's shared in the appropriate way with all the other stakeholders that need to see that information instead of repeating and repeating and repeating.

[A]

So, I mean, this is a sort of holy grail in the public sector in a way of becoming more productive. Because there's not going to be much more money, is there? I mean, that seems to be.

[B]

Yeah, there's definitely not going to be very much more money. And I think, I mean, we want arbor to be, like, a joy to use. Right. So that ultimately, if you're a teacher, when you open your laptop, you're thinking, cool, instead of, you know, that's sort of minor. Your real measure is going, I don't hate using this software. And in fact, it's slightly nicer to use arbor than it might be to use the thing that my partner uses to do, you know, CRM. CRM, exactly. It's certainly nicer to use arbor than some of the CRMs that I use each day, that's for sure. So just like a little bit of joy, maybe that means you're going to be a slightly happier teacher in the classroom. And that has a butterfly effect, let's say.

[A]

By butterfly, you mean as in chaos theory.

[B]

Yeah. So like, little tiny thing can have an amplified effect in some other ways. Yeah.

[A]

And suddenly everyone's doing more work.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. Lots more maths. Plenty more time for maths.

[A]

Something positive.

[B]

You'll have lots of. Great.

[A]

Does it work in recruitment? Does it have a recruitment.

[B]

Yeah. So we have a aspect. We've got a applicant tracking system and we're just launching job boards and things like that now. That's in the new. The new.

[A]

That's obviously very important.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. And I think having that full lifecycle view of recruitment to then classroom performance, how that staff member is, is doing, are they being well supported? Are they getting the right training? In cpd, we start to have a kind of much more holistic view of how school staff members are getting on.

[A]

Well, thanks for sharing these thoughts and I had no idea that you could do all these things on the app of Arbor education, which must be really helpful to teachers, parents and pupils.

[B]

We hope so.

[A]

So many congratulations on building this business so far.

[B]

Thank you.

[A]

I wish you success in getting the other half of the market.

[B]

Thanks very much.

[A]

Fantastic. And so I'm going to ask you two questions.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Which I ask everybody who visits our podcast studio and the first question is what gets you up on a Monday.

[B]

Morning being only halfway to taking over the whole market? I guess it'd be one of them. I think, you know, every day in Arbor is a school day and I like the fact that what we do is quite hard. It has a good income and we're building, you know, a good impact and we're building a good business. So we get like good all round satisfaction but we're nowhere near done.

[A]

I like that. Everyday in arbors, a school day. Yeah, all year round. You sound like that athlete Daley Thompson who trained on Christmas Day. The mindset. I like that. And then my last question, there's a question from my interview book, why you? One of what's called the fateful 15 is where do you see yourself in five years time?

[B]

Well, I think I'm just about to sort of change my role from purely revenue and sales to a much broader commercial role. So I'll be running customer success training, onboarding, demand generation. So for me, like I'm almost starting a new job in, in January, so I think it's going to be really exciting because all of those areas can evolve hugely over the next five years as we grow the business as well. I have this kind of future fantasy about being a business school professor, but I think I have to have a PhD or I've written a book or something before I get there, so I'm putting that off for a bit.

[A]

Oh, I know plenty have done either of those things.

[B]

Cool.

[A]

So don't. Don't hold back. Thank you, Philippa, for joining me on All About Business. I'm your host, James Reed, chairman and CEO of Reed, a family run recruitment and philanthropy company. If you'd like to find out more about Reed, Philippa and Arbor Education, all links are in the show notes. See you next time.