Narrow Quay Solutions

Decision making support

Succinct and focused advice based on sector experience, financial expertise and report writing capability. Reports will focus on the specific question in hand to assist decisions makers by providing an independent third-party perspective.

• Feasibility reports: looking at potential growth opportunities, such as mergers, acquisitions, diversifying, or downsizing.
• Commercial due diligence: particularly for schools who are being acquired to get to know the acquirer.
• Efficiency reviews: looking at the school as a whole, specific team processes or on a project-specific basis.

Fractional Finance Director support

Creating capacity, on a flexible basis, such as emergency short term cover, project focused support or on an ongoing basis. Fractional support provides guaranteed specialist expertise which is cost efficient and quick compared to hiring more staff.

• Creating breathing space for in house teams to complete both discrete tasks, and day to day work
• Project support work, assisting with collating disclosure materials and offering transaction support
• Assisting with recruitment of finance staff
• Reviewing and updating current systems

Pupil Recruitment and Retention

Helping schools assess their current operations, review strategy and boost recruitment and retention both domestically and internationally by:

• Auditing  pupil recruitment and retention operations, and reporting and forecasting systems and recommending improvement
• Developing domestic recruitment strategy
• Developing international recruitment strategy
• Assessing opportunities to boost recruitment and retention for the school
• Understanding possible barriers and how to overcome them
• Training frontline/academic staff to build a culture of recruitment
• Providing support for pupil number logistics, including year group numbers, academic sets setting, pastoral area logistics, gender logistics
• Providing fractional support to build capacity in admissions teams and post-merger support
• Supporting with overseas event planning
• Sharing knowledge and experience on identified markets.

VAT support

Ongoing support with reclaims and preparing for the end of the first VAT year, or reviewing current practices to ensure compliance.