Phillippa De’Ath

What are you passionate about?

I am passionate about joining up public services and making life simpler for those with the biggest pressures.

Prior to joining Arbor, I spent 10 years at IBM, before setting up two schools. Seeing how hard it was to support a family through the technology and processes linked to the school system, compared to business systems, made me determined to improve the tools involved. I believe that better operating systems make schools a better place to work, driving down workload and enabling more flexibility for staff.

What are your greatest accomplishments?

As a founding member of the Arbor team, I’m proud of the impact we’ve had on the UK state school sector. We were underestimated for a good 7 years, before schools, partners and competitors really took us seriously. This gave us time to show schools that there was a better way of managing their processes, and allowed us to challenge their thinking on alignment of people and systems, ultimately to help them transform.

Along the way, I built the sales team and processes from scratch, and this approach has led to a sustainable model where schools, LAs and trusts genuinely enjoy partnering with us on their digital transformation journey. 

What do you love most about being part of The Key Group?

There is a real motivation among my colleagues to make the lives of school leaders, teachers and back-office staff easier - from giving them the most thorough and effective safeguarding policies to keep children safe, to predicting attendance issues so that staff and parents can get ahead of them, or to enabling the smooth operation of a MAT - everyone in the group genuinely lives and breathes this stuff. Alongside many current school governors and trustees, our staff team includes former classroom teachers, free schools founders, MAT directors and local councillors. Together, that knowledge and experience combines with the work of the brilliant customer support teams and product engineers to solve things smartly. 

What else should we know about you?

I was the first person in my family to stay at school past 16, and I attended the still all-women college of Newnham, Cambridge. I’m a Newnham Associate, which means I’ve pledged to work with young women to help them plan their careers through my own network and experience.

I’m afraid to tell you that we still need this kind of gender-specific advice, so that we can ensure we have all of the best brains working on solving the problems of the future.  

Also, my daughter is almost the same age as Arbor!