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

0:00Welcome to All About Business with me, James Reed, the podcast that covers everything about business, management and leadership.

0:16What 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 Dianne, 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 organisations, 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.

1:00Well, today on All About Business, I couldn't be more delighted than to welcome Philippa Diath 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. Thank you. Thanks for having me today as well. So ARBOR is a management information system for schools, which is a B2B SaaS ERP system in tech speak, which basically means we help schools to manage not just their data, but all their back office work.

1:46Hang on, hang on. I love all those acronyms. B2B, business to business, SaaS, software as a service, ERP, let me get it, enterprise resource planning system. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. All right. So there's a lot going on there. 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. So they must love you. I mean, because I always hear that teachers are overburdened by admin.

2:22How's it going? Exactly. Are sales, as the chief revenue officer, they're going well? 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. So you're the market leader.

2:59Well done. Thank you. How many schools are we talking about here, just so people understand the scale of 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. And how many schools are there in the UK? How big's the market? 24 ,000. So you've got almost half the market. Yeah, almost half. And you've got half to go. Yeah, exactly. Plenty to do. And is there an advantage of lots of schools being on the same platform? Do they share information or not? Yeah, they do. So whether you're a group of schools, schools work better in groups, right?

3:32So whether that's a group of schools in a local authority, like in Hackney, or a group of schools in an academy trust, 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. Um, 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 these sort of many tens of millions of budgets and thousands of staff. So they're really complex, kind of quite commercial organizations, Academy Trusts.

4:08And that's really been the growth of Academy Trusts has sort of spurred the growth of Arbor as well. So that's where you began, really. Were they the first ones to say, hey, we're interested in this? I mean, we started back in 2012, which was a new era of government academies program and the free schools program, and I'm the founder of two free schools. That really spurred a lot of innovation, for good or ill. But there was a lot of change at that time in UK education. So this is during the coalition government? Yeah, like coalition into... It was real like some Michael Gove era. of, um, and that, you know, academies were sort of a labour plan, particularly in Hackney, but, um, and it is much more political in education than I thought it would be, but this is really about kind of decision making.

4:54So, 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's still, you know, nearly half of the schools in England still use because 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.

5:26But your system is different because you use, and this is key, I believe, the cloud. Yeah. And people can then dial it up. 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 uh google or microsoft or whatever you're using um 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 online, so that it's secure and easily accessible and those things.

6:13So let alone, would you like to use AI to transform how you run your school? Like that's good. So how are you getting on with that? Are people doing that? Yeah, what are the transformations that you see as possible? 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. You can just ask... So what's the question? Like, how am I, uh, what's the attendance rate for boys in my school today compared to the national average?

6:45And you can type that kind of question. How many days has James really missed this term? Exactly. Or you could be that specific. Maybe too many. And how is James doing compared to all the other Jameses? Yeah, no, this is really alarming. But I can see, very helpful for teachers. You are on time today, so don't worry. Thanks for pointing that out to our listeners. And so were you. 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.

7:20In 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-pandemic. Since the pandemic, yeah. 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 it, is really crucial.

7:53And 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 bring that kid back into school. So they'd call the parent back, would they? Yeah, so they can then 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. So that's one good example of how the system supports schools. Have you got some others you could share?

8:27Yeah, I think, I mean, parent engagement is a really big thing. So there's over 3 million parents now use Arba app. Arba app? Arba app's on the app store. So what do they do on that? They pay for lunch, they see whether James was late or not. They can buy lunch on there. Yeah, so there's a big kind of payments processing part of the system as well. Does Apple take a percent? Of the school lunch? They don't. Apple doesn't take a percent of the school lunch, I'll please say. But you've got Apple and Google Pay, and it means it's easier for parents to kind of stay in touch with school and for schools to see which parents are actually engaged with the messages.

9:10So 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 not abnormal in certain parts of the country, you can really quickly translate messages and send... On the app. Yeah. And so everybody's getting things in the format that makes most sense to them most quickly. I had no idea. This is amazing. So, this is informing parents in real time what's going on. Yeah, exactly.

9:45...of their children at school. Exactly. I think the other thing that... I mean, I have to ask, are there other competitors doing this? Yeah. Yeah. There are. I'm not going to name them on this podcast. No, I wasn't going to ask you to do that, but there is... There's plenty of choice in the market. There is choice. Yeah. 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 Arbor's kind of the main platform, but you can buy in other systems and connect with our system and...

10:19Right. So the curriculum will be on a different end. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yours is the sort of administration information... Exactly. ...management. Exactly. Right. What else can it do? It can. So if you're the CEO of an academy trust that has 40 schools, which is sort of... That's a lot. Well, yeah, that's kind of the optimum size probably for you to be able to know who all of the head teachers are, have enough budget to be able to start to kind of centralize a bit, maybe get some economies of scale. If you're in that role, you can see in real time what's happening in all of your schools in Arbor, and that just works on day one.

10:59So you don't have to employ, you know, a data scientist. When you say you can see in real time, what would you be looking at? So you can see, again, I use attendance because it's neat, the data is really good quality, but you can see how attendance is doing, you know, how... What, pupil and teacher attendance? 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 Arbor 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.

11:43And 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? 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, Reed has worked with thousands of businesses around the world, helping them to recruit and to grow. This is what inspired us to create Reed.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.

12:21Whether you're hiring your first team member or your 50th, Reed.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 entrepreneurs, I think it's fair to say, did not shine at school. I've 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.

13:09What 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. What's going on? What could be done to make that more likely? I mean, I guess to be the entrepreneurial spirit, it's 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.

13:43So, 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 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 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.

14:16And 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 outside of 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 start a school. He's now started at a university, I think there's this kind of real ability to just speak confidently, whether that's your first job interview or on a stage or to parents in a local community centre as I had to do for the school.

14:52You can be taught those skills and often children are not taught them and you inherit them if you're lucky to grow up in a household where your parents speak to you like that. So you might be good at maths, but if you can't communicate, it's not going to carry you very far. Exactly. Well, 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 there's a big focus now on oracy in schools. So it's called oracy. What does that mean? Oracy, so your ability to speak, really, to orate. Really? Yeah. To hold a room. To hold a room, yeah.

15:28Which I think is not just about being a great after-dinner speaker, but being able to go in and ask for what you want or to articulate what you might be good at. you're interested in doing, and that takes practice. And that's not in the curriculum? Uh, it's not. They can still... I can't speak, which is an irony. You're cross, keep going. You don't know that. I was never taught oracy. You're getting your message across, keep going. That's so awesome. Um, you, um, 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.

16:17And 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 when you talk to architects or creatives, people who have 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, it's interesting. More and more important, I think, as technology advances, because computers even talk, you know.

16:50Yeah. So to be able to communicate well verbally. Exactly. I think 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. I think that's quite exciting because it almost goes back to the beginning when all stories were told around the fireplace.

17:26Yeah, exactly. And the history was an oral history. 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 creative discussion as well. I grew up in rural Leicestershire. My mum and dad ran a pub. My mum especially was quite entrepreneurial. She had a few different businesses and things. And, um, and we, uh, 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.

18:06Right. And so she started looking at the school, and it's called Twycross. It got started by two retired headteachers. So they've been headteachers in Birmingham. They've 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, um, maybe a little bit earlier. And, um, 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.

18:44And then, by the time I joined that school, um, 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, uh, the headmistress's mother's cottage, um, 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 were at least four EdTech founders and two school founders that come from that same school.

19:29From that village in Leicestershire. And not because we set up an alumni program to like do, but just like coincidentally. Well, or not coincidentally as it's... 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 the free schools program was kind of exactly that. So you then followed the example of these two headteachers who taught you? Yeah, a bit later. Well, you said two schools. Tell me about that. That was in Hackney, was it? Yeah, in Hackney. 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.

20:04And that's obviously not what actually happened. No, I'm not amazed. Why not? I know, I don't know. So I was 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 sciencey, it's a bit commercial. It was extremely uncool. 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'd been there for about nine years, got pregnant, was on my very well-paid maternity leave.

20:41When my baby was born, I nearly died the week after. You nearly died? 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? Really? So you had a big epiphany. Yeah, I had a big epiphany. Yeah. And I'd always been interested in teaching, you know, science teaching, teaching, maths 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.

21:21And 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, my friend Sharmadine, whose book is just behind me, she... One of our former guests, Sharmadine Reid? Former guests, yeah. So she was there as well? My school is across from her shop, her first shop. Oh, okay. So there's a lot of entrepreneurial energy in this area. Yeah, exactly. So it'd be like with my baby, she'd be with her baby going, where can I and find loads of mums.

22:03So we'd be like getting loads of forms and getting people to sign up and so they'd send their kids to a school. The first school that we wanted to set up was a secondary school and that's really because we just thought 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. So this was the secondary school, so you did a primary and a secondary school?

22:41Yeah, we did the secondary school first. And why was it really hard? I'm not suggesting it shouldn't be, but I want to understand what was hard. Well, so the free schools program was like total cowboy land, right? So the government, the Department of 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 1 ,200 signatures from parents and local businesses and support and so on, pitched it to the Department of Education and they said, yeah, great, you know, you're an impressive bunch and we think this is going to work really well.

23:31Hackney's an area that needs a bit more. 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 were no guides on how you do it. So you literally had to go, okay, okay, well, now we have to hire a team. And then we have to... So you have to hire a headteacher. So what did you do? Who did you hire first? A headteacher? Headteacher, yeah. That's what I'd have done. Yeah, we had an amazing founding headteacher who had sort of wanted to retire but wasn't quite ready to. 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.

24:11It's 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 another year. Oh. Um, and... So they gave you a paid sabbatical? Yeah. For a year? It was like a quarter salary or something, but still... Right, but yeah, you were getting something. So IBM were pretty good, really. Yeah, they were really good. They were... I wrote a very nice thank you letter. Right. Well, it's nice to hear that, when a company does well, and then you have a good relationship with them. Yeah, you put in 10 years of service and you're well looked after.

24:46I'm hugely grateful to them for all of my experiences.