I am Neil Limbrick. I have been a technical lead in education since November 2000 — IT support, then senior leadership, then a trust central team — and advised schools and trusts independently since 2008, trading as Limbrick Consultancy LLP since December 2018. Schools and trusts bring me in for the technology decisions that are expensive to get wrong.
Neil Limbrick
Founding partner
Nearly always the same shape of problem: a decision about technology that has to be defensible to a finance committee, a board or an auditor — and nobody in the room whose job it has ever been to make it before.
Working out what you actually need before anyone sends a quote, then helping you read what the supplier really offered rather than what the covering letter says.
I have sat on both sides of this: buying for schools and trusts, and contributing as a practitioner to the DfE schools buying strategy.
A plan that survives contact with the budget. What you have, what it costs to keep, what has to be replaced and when — written so that the people who have to approve it are not required to be technical.
Mapped against the DfE digital and technology standards, which I contributed to.
One-to-one support for network managers and IT leads who are the only technical person in the building and have nobody to ask. Regular sessions over time, not a course.
This is the work I am asked for most often, and the work I most enjoy.
Managing technical staff is hard when you cannot judge the work. I support the person they report to — usually a business manager or a deputy head — to set the right level of challenge and the right level of help.
Conferences, network meetings and in-house training days. More detail below.
Bringing practitioner experience to national work: the DfE teacher vacancy service, the schools buying strategy, and most recently the digital and technology standards.
If you are a supplier or a sector body who needs someone able to speak for schools rather than about them, this is that.
This is a small practice, not an agency. You get me, on the days you book, and there is nobody between us. For advisory work that is usually the whole point.
It is the wrong answer if you need a team on site, cover on every day of term, or somebody to carry the risk of delivering an implementation. I will say so, and where I can I will tell you who to call instead.
Twenty-six years in education, and still in the room rather than writing about it.
I started in IT support at a large secondary school and worked up to the senior leadership team, setting up a support service for the local primaries along the way 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 have worked for myself since 2008. Limbrick Consultancy LLP, which carries the practice today, was incorporated on 7 December 2018.
The part that keeps the advice honest is that I am still a customer and still a volunteer, not only a supplier:
I speak at conferences and network meetings, and run in-house training days for schools and trusts. The topics I am asked for most are cyber security, IT strategy, GDPR, asset management, website compliance, recruitment, and communication within a large team of busy people.
A speaker profile, photograph and topic outlines for organisers: to publish.
If you arrived here looking for the online communities, the network directory, or sponsorship of a local school business manager network, that is not this. It is a separate company with a separate site, and this one cannot help you with it.
Tell me roughly what the problem is and I will tell you honestly whether I am the right person for it. There is no charge for that conversation.
The old site pointed here at enquiry@theEducationCollective.com. A consultancy enquiry should not arrive in the platform inbox.
14 Connaught Avenue, Kidderminster,
Worcestershire DY11 6LS