Helping schools get the staffing, pay and people side right

Does any of this sound familiar?

• You are not sure whether your teacher salaries are competitive, and published salary data doesn’t reflect schools like yours.
• Good teachers are leaving, and you only find out what they were offered at the exit conversation.
• The staffing structure grew one appointment at a time, and middle leadership roles have become unclear.
• Allowances and responsibility payments have built up over the years and no longer follow a logic anyone can explain.
• Policies exist, but they are out of date, or applied differently by different leaders.
• You run several schools, and each has its own pay scales and ways of doing things.

How we can help

Staffing structures

A clear structure for teaching, leadership and support roles that fits your size and budget, with clarity about leadership layers and middle leadership roles.

Teacher pay and benchmarking

The UAE Education Reward Benchmark lets upper-tier schools compare teacher, leadership and support pay with genuinely comparable schools, by curriculum, fee band, location and years of experience. It is built from the employer’s side, and it can show where you are already competitive as well as where you are behind. Alongside it, we help design pay scales, allowances and progression that are fair, affordable and easy to explain.

People policies and processes

The essential policies, recruitment and onboarding processes, staff handbook and appraisal approach a school needs, written in plain language and sized to your school.

Running the school well

Sometimes the issue is broader: decisions taking too long, unclear responsibilities between board, principal and business team, or a group office and its schools pulling in different directions. Our organisation design work helps you see what is really going on and what to fix first.

Taking the admin off people’s plates

School processes such as staff onboarding, visas and approvals involve a lot of chasing. Where it helps, our technology can take on the repetitive steps. We always start with the process, not the software.

Independent assurance on your people capabilities

A global enterprise has a dedicated specialist for each part of its people agenda. A school typically has one generalist HR manager, or a small team, covering all six domains of our Organisation Maturity Model. That is not a criticism of school HR teams; it is a structural reality.

Our organisation maturity audit looks at 42 people capabilities using the same lenses every year, so progress can be proved, not just felt. No school needs to excel at all 42. The work runs as a cycle:

1. Measure all 42, consistently and independently.
2. Prioritise the gaps by impact, risk and dependency, so you have a short list, not 42 projects.
3. Build: we bring the specialist depth you don’t carry in-house, and coach your team so the capability stays.
4. Reassess with the same model, to show what has moved.

Schools that commission an audit can join the education benchmark free of charge.

Independent assurance. Stronger people capabilities. Better schools.

The six domains

Select a domain to see the capabilities a school’s people function is expected to cover.

How we work with schools

• We start with a conversation. No commitment, just an honest discussion about what you are seeing.
• We keep it proportionate. A single school needs clear, practical answers, not a corporate consulting programme.
• We work alongside you: with the principal, bursar, business manager, governors or group HR.
• We understand the sector. Education is a specialist area for 10k, and one of the sectors in which our flagship projects have been delivered.