About Neil Limbrick — theEducationCollective

My first job in a school was register monitor, and then computer monitor. Both of them meant working for the school secretary — the role that later became the school business manager. I was paid in chocolate.

I got that job because my mum was a school secretary somewhere else, and knew someone. So school business staff knowing each other has been working out rather well for me since I was about nine.

I'm Neil Limbrick, and I've worked in education full time since November 2000.

I started in IT support at a large secondary school, worked up to the senior leadership team, and along the way set up a support service for the local primaries because nobody else was going to. After that I led IT through a difficult period at a school in one of the most economically challenged wards in the country, and helped form the multi-academy company that followed. Then a central team role at a trust built out of two others that had been through very public trouble — where the work was as much policy, rebranding and GDPR as it was technology.

I started theEducationCollective in 2008 and ran it alongside a full-time job in a school for the best part of a decade — evenings and weekends, while doing the job it was built to serve. I have worked for myself since 2018.

Why this platform exists

Somewhere in the middle of all that I ended up in the communities themselves rather than just near them.

I chair the Sandwell School Business Manager Network. I sit on the committee of the Birmingham Association of School Business Management. I'm an ambassador for the Association of Network Managers in Education. I've been a parent governor, a staff governor, a trust-appointed governor and a community governor — chair at two schools and vice chair at a third.

Which means I have personally done the thing this platform is for: chased the renewals, booked the venue, written the sponsor letter, wondered whether anyone would turn up. TheEducationCollective exists because I kept meeting people doing all of that on goodwill and a spreadsheet, and because the software that would have helped was priced for professional associations rather than for a group of school business managers who meet three times a year.

It now supports over a hundred online communities and more than ten thousand members. The work has had national recognition, but the part I'd rather be judged on is that the communities are still running.

Beyond the communities

Work with the DfE

The teacher vacancy service, the schools buying strategy, and most recently the digital and technology standards.

Speaking and training

Cyber security, IT strategy, website compliance, recruitment, asset management, GDPR and communication. Details and a profile to publish.

Consultancy

Procurement support, IT strategy and mentoring for schools and trusts, through Limbrick Consultancy — a separate business from this one.

What this means for your community

That there is one person accountable for the platform your members use, that he has run a community himself and still does, and that if you email about something broken you are not opening a ticket in a queue.

It also means the honest limitation: this is a small operation, not a software company with a support department. That is usually the point, and occasionally it is the drawback. Better to know which you are choosing.