sector VENDOR PROFILE
17
No longer simply experts in education finance, HCSS Education is swiftly expanding to become the UK’s leading education solution specialist. On the company’s 10th anniversary, MD and founder HOWARD JACKSON speaks to EdExec about his history of supplying solutions to SLTs
demand. “To think we used to get a summer break,” quips MD and founder Howard Jackson when he speaks to EdExec, in between getting one of his 1,000 academy clients ready for the new academic – and now fi nancial – year.
I As a business,
our background is in education consultancy and training and then we created software from that expertise
DEEP ROOTS IN EDUCATION In the decade since founding HCSS, Jackson has seen the company grow from a small education consultancy of four staff members to a major player in the education arena with 48 people on staff , including 13 technology experts and programmers. The idea for HCSS started even further back, in
1993, when Jackson, then a school business manager, spoke at a headteacher conference about long-term fi nancial planning. When he showed the audience a rudimentary software model he’d created for his own use, they all wanted to buy it. With the demand there, Jackson quickly set about developing a version of his system he could distribute. “I created it on a fairly sophisticated Excel worksheet and I was putting it on a little fl oppy disk, putting them in a binder and I was selling them,” he remembers. “It was almost like going to conferences and selling them out of my boot!” Users soon demanded more and more features and Jackson realised he needed to get the professional programmers in. It was from there that the idea to launch HCSS took off . “As a business, our background is in education
consultancy and training and then we created software from that expertise,” Jackson explains. “Rather than a software company that created software for education, we’re exactly the reverse of that: we were in education already, delivering services to education, training and working with leadership, and creating software as tools to enable a leadership team to perform better.” Now HCSS is doing everything from working
with primary schools to help them understand the nuts and bolts of fi nancial planning to, on the other side of the spectrum, helping academies with their strategic planning, while developing software programmes to support this.
CONTACT US HCSS Education 01625 511011
hcsseducation.co.uk theschoolbus.net
DRIVING CHANGE Despite being fi nancial experts, diversifi cation is central to HCSS’s future plans. In May, the company launched TheSchoolBus, a subscription service off ering professional resources to educators – specifi cally bite-sized summaries of key policy documents. This also came out of Jackson’s experience as a busy school leader, when his heavy workload meant he felt unable to stay abreast with the many policy updates and initiatives coming out of
t’s a busy time for HCSS Education. Not only is the company in the midst of celebrating its 10-year anniversary, but, as specialists in education fi nance, with the academy programme full speed ahead, the company’s software and services are very much in
Westminster. “We felt we were doing a great job in the school but we didn’t know everything that was going on out there and you just couldn’t keep pace,” he explains. “The one thing that was absolutely certain as leaders in school, you haven’t got time for detail. When documents were coming out of the Department for Education that were 200 pages long on a new policy, we didn’t have time to read them.” With this in mind, TheSchoolBus is a website
that presents policy and regulation, on everything from catering and HR to fi nancial strategy, in three-minute portions by way of easy-to-read presentation documents that can be shared with other staff . With over 1,000 unique downloads available, it also off ers useful templates and tools to help implement the policy. As part of this, HCSS has launched its ‘Million Minutes a Day’ campaign, which aims to see school leaders across the country saving at least 40 minutes of their day by using the service. This gives them back the time to get on with doing what they need to do to run the school and therefore help improve the quality of teaching and learning.
LOOKING TO THE FUTURE Much like TheSchoolBus initiative, HCSS’s intuitive fi nancial software seeks to help school leaders and governors get a better understanding of their budgets using charts and graphs to present the information in as clear a way as possible. “I’m an accountant, have been in education for a lot of years and I go to governors meetings sometimes and hear fi nance reports being presented and I don’t understand them,” says Jackson. “I’m thinking: ‘What chance have the governors got of understanding them?’” With this in mind, the team never stops
developing new products. One of the latest developments was to create a web version of the already very successful FPS budgeting software, which, by way of a secure connection, gives users the ability to access their school accounts from anywhere, using an internet browser. This has been particularly useful for federations and multi-academy trusts where fi nance directors aren’t always tied to one location. It also enables them to produce consolidated reports across every academy/school in the group. The company continues to work with a number of
diff erent key partners to develop new products, including a Consolidation Reporting Tool for multi- academy trusts with Capita to be launched next month and a Curriculum Resource Planner in association with ASCL due to be rolled out in early 2014, which will help schools get an idea of what diff erent parts of the curriculum are costing them, enabling them to make better informed judgements about value-for-money. “The schools say to us what they need and we then
try to create something that is meeting that need and then advancing it,” says Jackson. With this approach so pivotal to everything it does, HCSS’s next 10 years promise to be just as successful as its last.
www.edexec.co.uk / september 2013
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