A few weeks ago Nick caught up with Ian Koxvold, currently Head of Education, Strategy and Corporate Development at Supporting Education Group, but many people might know him better for his years of strategic consultancy work across the education sector.

They talked about the changes across the education sector and what the future might hold in terms of new solutions and new strategies including:

• Ian’s background delivering projects across businesses and educational establishments to make them more effective or efficient
• The insight he gets working for Supporting Education Group as the largest provider of services to schools in the UK
• His perspective on consolidation, and how this has increased from maybe 2-3 players to around 10 in recent years
• What’s a good strategy for acquiring, and has consolidation peaked in his opinion
• The importance of use case analysis in any business, and using it to identify upsell and product integration opportunities
• How different products serve different use cases
• Advice for startups in the edtech space
• The concept of ‘one product for everything’ v ‘best of breed’ solutions
• School support services, the role they play in the evolving landscape, and future consolidation
• The perils of complacency when it comes to servicing your customer, and the potential pitfalls of having a dominant supplier in any given area
• How to measure the impact of solutions on schools and why this is important to success; should we be more ambitious about how we use data?
• The future of the MIS sector given recent changes, and what we might expect to see next
• Three things companies should be doing now to future-proof their business

We’ve split the interview into three parts to make it easier to digest – enjoy!

P.S. We’re aware that some of the audio is a bit rough in places so we’re working on getting a transcript created to accompany this Q&A – we’ll add once completed 🙂