theEducationCollective

Everything your community needs. None of the cost.

The platform, the website, and the contracts, policies and sponsor prospectus already written. Free to run, and you keep the membership income.

Start a community See who's already running one

The deal, in full

No trial, no tier you outgrow, no per-member pricing. There is one thing the free version can't do, and we'd rather say it up front than bury it.

You get

The whole platform. Every feature, every member, no cap and no expiry.

You keep

Your membership fees. Set them, collect them, and they're yours — we take nothing.

We do

Place the sponsor notices on your community. That revenue is ours, and it's what pays for the platform.

Why is it free?

Because the more communities that run here, the more schools we reach — and reaching schools is what sponsors pay us for. Your community growing is how we make our money. That's the whole model, and it only works if the platform is good enough that you'd stay without being locked in.

So there's no catch to find later. Sponsorship is ours; everything else is yours.

Two ways to pay for it

Not two products. It's the same platform either way — every feature, no cap, no tier you outgrow. The only question is who pays for it: our sponsors, or you.

Sponsor-funded
FreeNo card, no trial, no expiry
  • The whole platform, unlimited members
  • Your own website and domain
  • You keep every penny of your membership fees
  • We place sponsor notices on your community, and that income pays for it
Start a community
You fund it
2pper member per day · from £365 a year
  • The identical platform — nothing added, nothing withheld
  • No adverts in front of your members. Most communities who pay do it for this alone
  • Fund it however suits you — membership fees, your own sponsors, a grant, your reserves
  • Counted daily, billed termly in arrears. Nothing to pay up front
Work out your cost

Communities move between the two, in both directions, whenever it suits them.

What you stop doing

Most communities run on a spreadsheet, a mailing list, an events site and a WhatsApp group. Here's what replaces each of them.

Chasing renewals

Membership records, renewal dates and reminders handled for you. You see who's due, who's lapsed and who's new without opening a spreadsheet.

Building a website

A proper site for your community on your own domain, included and maintained — not a side project you never finish.

Rebuilding the mailing list

Members maintain their own details. Your newsletter goes to whoever is actually a member this morning, not whoever was in the CSV.

Juggling event tools

Listings, bookings and attendance in the same place as the membership. Conference sign-in and delegate tools included, so you always know who came and who paid.

Losing the good stuff

A resource library that stays organised — templates, policies and guidance members can find again six months later.

Guessing what members want

Polls and surveys built in, so you can ask the question properly instead of counting replies in a group chat.

Neil — confirm this covers what a community actually gets, and tell me what I've left out.

Communities already running here

School business managers, governors and school leaders, organised locally and regionally across the country.

100+
online communities
10,000+
members
40+
school business manager communities

Browse the full directory of communities →

Things you can add

Two services your members often ask for. Both are extra, and both work the same way: one invoice a term, paid by the community. How you fund it is up to you — build it into your membership fee, or offer it as an add-on and charge for it.

Add-on

SBM Toolkit

A library of ready-made documents, policies and templates for school business management, kept current so your members aren't writing from scratch.

Add-on

FundEd

Funding and grants search, so members can find money their school is eligible for without trawling twenty websites.

Worth knowing: the invoice comes to the community each term whether or not your members have paid you yet, so price it with that in mind.

Trying to reach schools?

Sponsorship across our communities puts you in front of the people who actually make purchasing decisions in schools — business managers, governors and school leaders — through the organisations they already trust.

How sponsorship works

Who's behind this

Neil Limbrick

I'm Neil Limbrick. I've worked in schools since 2000 — IT support, then senior leadership, then a trust central team — and for most of that time I've been running communities as well as building things for them. I chair the Sandwell SBM Network, I'm an ambassador for the Association of Network Managers in Education, and the work has had national recognition.

So when I say the admin is the hard part, it's not a sales line. I built this because I kept meeting people running excellent communities on goodwill and a spreadsheet, spending their evenings on the paperwork instead of the thing they set out to do.

There's a real person behind this platform. If something breaks, or you want to talk through whether a community is worth starting at all, you're talking to me.

More about Neil  ·  Speaking and media