Leadership
Ask any teacher what they’re there to do and they will all clearly tell you, ‘Give every student the time, attention and education they need.’ Everything about how schools train, resource and support teaching staff is built around that single purpose. It’s why we obsess over class sizes, planning time, CPD, and workload reviews, because the entire system exists to protect a teacher’s ability to make an impact in front of students.
Now ask the same question of the finance director, the procurement lead, or the business manager sitting three floors up in the trust’s central team. Their answer is just as clear: make sure the money, the contracts, the data, and the decisions behind the scenes are working as hard as possible for the schools they serve. Their contribution may be less visible to pupils day to day, but it is no less important to whether a trust thrives or merely survives.
The challenge is that the systems and support available to these teams have not always evolved at the same pace. We’ve spent a decade building systems, training, and cultural expectations that maximise a teacher’s impact. Across finance, procurement, operations and data, investment has often been more uneven, leaving central teams to work around fragmented processes and technology while expectations continue to increase.
Instead, too many teams are still stitching together multiple systems to overcome single, isolated problems, from spreadsheets to legacy accounting, compliance, contracts, and accounts payable automation, with systems that often do not integrate effectively. At the same time, they are making six-figure purchasing decisions without always having timely, joined-up information available at the point those decisions are made.
This is one of the gaps that this year’s ‘Connect’, the TransforMATive Digital Leadership Summit, is highlighting. Digital change in education has too often been approached in silos: one project for the MIS, another for cyber, another for finance, often with limited integration between them and all competing for the same stretched central team’s attention.
What connected can look like: P2P within a wider operational ecosystem
I’d argue what MATs actually need isn’t another disconnected point solution. They need a connected operational ecosystem in which finance, procurement, people, data and technology can work together, while specialist platforms continue to do what they do best.
Within that wider ecosystem, a unified procure-to-pay (P2P) framework can provide an important connective layer between purchasing decisions, approvals, suppliers and financial information. Done well, it can help surface critical trust data to key staff when they need to make a decision, rather than several weeks later at month-end.
And this is where AI can actually earn its place. I personally see this as an augmentation of education professionals, supporting the less visible work of surfacing the right number, flagging the right anomaly, or drafting the first cut of an analysis, so the human making the decision has better information a lot faster.
Education leaders are rightly cautious about anything that looks like AI replacing judgement; safeguarding and trust are too central to how schools work for that caution to be misplaced. The right framing isn’t AI-driven. It’s human-led and AI-augmented. Accountability stays exactly where it is; the effort required to get good information in front of the right person is simply reduced.
The part that requires a collective, not a single vendor
Beyond information sharing, if done well, this connected transparency can also create value in a broader way. For example, why should a three-school trust pay more for the same goods and services than a thirty-school trust down the road?
The short answer is often size and scale. Larger trusts with greater spending power can typically negotiate better pricing, better terms, and stronger supplier relationships. This means the MATs with the least capacity to negotiate are often the ones paying the most.
That’s not a systems problem any single trust can fix by buying better software alone. It is something the sector can begin to address when trusts, suppliers and the wider sector connect around models that create greater transparency and collective purchasing power, potentially through something closer to a shared marketplace, with comparable pricing and terms accessible to trusts regardless of size.
That’s the real test of ‘Connect’ as a theme. It’s easy to agree that silos are bad. It’s harder to build something that depends on organisations that do not currently work together choosing to collaborate. A shared procurement model across MATs of every size is exactly that kind of collective effort, and it’s precisely the sort of ambition a Summit like this one exists to explore with the leaders, practitioners and partners who could help make it happen.
Philip Douglas, CEO, Compleat Software
With over two decades of leadership across the technology and SaaS sectors, Philip Douglas brings a unique blend of financial expertise and technology-driven vision to the forefront of digital transformation. As CEO of Compleat Software, he has built a platform that empowers businesses to streamline procurement and finance operations through intelligent automation, seamless integration, and user-friendly design.
Compleat Software
Since 2008, Compleat has been helping schools digitise the entire purchasing process with online purchasing software, allowing all departments to submit purchase requisitions with automated approval workflows based on your chosen criteria, giving finance teams full oversight and control over future cash requirements.
Written by:
Phil Douglas (CEO)
