Compliance you can prove. Operations you can scale.
Practical tools, templates and advisory for the people who run the business side of schools — built by someone who does the job at multi-academy trust scale.
Written by an operator, not a content mill
The market is full of generic templates and AI wrappers. These tools come from someone actually running finance, estates, HR, compliance and governance across an academy estate — so they hold up when a challenge lands.
Grounded in the real duties
Built against DfE and ESFA primary guidance, the Academy Trust Handbook and current legislation — not second-hand summaries.
Trust-scale by default
Designed for how MATs actually work: school-level detail that rolls up to a trust view, with RAG logic you can put in front of trustees.
Ready to use on Monday
No consultancy day rate to unlock them. Download, brand, populate — and get a defensible position the same week.
Products that pay for themselves
Each one targets a specific, dated pressure on school business teams — where getting it wrong costs real money or real risk.
FSM Funding-Protection Tracker
Get every pupil into the right free-school-meals category ahead of the September 2026 expansion. Six-tab Excel model with RAG logic and a trust roll-up dashboard — because a misclassification is lost funding, per pupil, per year.
Benedict's Law Allergy Pack
A readiness checker, tracker, staff training deck and parent handout, aligned to the DfE's statutory "Allergy safety in schools" guidance. Everything a school needs to evidence it's ready before the deadline.
AI Prompt Pack for SBMs
36 tested prompts for the school business desk — letters, policies, analysis, reports and comms. The AI productivity layer, written for operations rather than the classroom.
The 6-Step Build Method
A six-module course on building your own school-business tools with AI — with a companion workbook, template vault and prompt library. Stop buying one-off templates; learn to build them.
Everything, kept current — the SOL Membership
One subscription for the whole toolkit, plus what a one-off download can't give you: a new tool every month and a compliance calendar that stays current as the rules change.
Practitioner
- A new template or tool every month
- Rolling statutory compliance calendar
- Full access to the template vault
- Member pricing on courses & advisory
- Monthly members' Q&A
Trust
- Everything in Practitioner, trust-wide
- Multi-user access for your whole team
- Trust roll-up versions of every tool
- Priority Q&A and roadmap input
- Onboarding for your business team
Estates Statutory Compliance Health Check
An independent review of where your estate actually stands against its statutory duties — with a clear, prioritised action plan you can hand to your board.
- 86-point review across 13 statutory areas
- RAG-rated findings with a prioritised action plan
- Board-ready summary you can present as-is
- Fixed scope, fixed fee — no open-ended day rates
checks, one clear verdict
Find the gaps before an inspection, insurer or incident does.
Enquire about a health checkOne useful thing for school business teams, every couple of weeks
New tools, a rolling compliance calendar, and practical notes on funding, estates and operations. No noise. Unsubscribe anytime.
We'll only email you about School Ops Lab. Your address is never shared.
Built on the day job, not a business book
School Ops Lab is run by a practising business manager in a multi-academy trust, responsible for finance, estates, HR, health & safety, governance, IT and compliance across a group of academies.
Every tool here started as a real problem on a real desk. Nothing is theoretical, nothing is recycled from a template farm, and everything is built clean-room so it's yours to brand and use.