As many people know, I used to run Lourdes IT.

It began while I was working at St Bede’s Middle School. The school was approached about me providing support to other schools, and from there the service continued to grow.

What started as strategic support became full, boots-on-the-ground IT delivery under the banner of “schools helping schools”.

When St Bede’s joined a multi-academy trust, IT was centralised and the service expanded further. Eventually, we were supporting around 50 schools outside the trust on a not-for-profit basis, with a team of between 20 and 25 staff.

I was, and remain, a strong supporter of schools working together across services such as IT, whether through formal MAT structures, partnerships or traded services.

Being based within the education sector was a major selling point. We understood schools, their pressures and their priorities.

During the five or six years we operated the service, we only lost one customer. That school joined a MAT that had developed its own internal IT support model, which looked remarkably similar to Lourdes IT and was itself approaching other schools.

The team delivered exceptional work. The service grew consistently, retained customers and adapted to meet their needs.

But the uncomfortable truth I learned is that this model is extremely difficult to make work at any meaningful scale.

Lourdes IT was ultimately closed by a new CEO, who was uncomfortable with the trust supporting schools he perceived as competitors. He also believed the service was taking attention away from teaching and learning.

That decision exposed one of the fundamental risks of building a commercial or traded service inside a school or MAT: it will never truly be yours.

However successful it becomes, its future remains dependent on the priorities and risk appetite of the trust’s leadership.

We also experienced the practical difficulties of running something resembling a business inside a MAT structure that was never designed for it.

Education systems can already be difficult for support teams to navigate. Trying to operate and grow a service employing more than 20 people added another level of complexity.

The team’s success required constant flexibility within a structure that was often rigid and not designed to support commercial growth.

We considered separating the service and becoming an independent traded organisation. However, the financial and legal complications would probably have made the model economically unviable.

Pay and benefits were another major issue.

The salaries, pensions and employment benefits available within education are difficult to replicate outside the funded structure of a MAT. Carrying those costs into an independent business would make pricing less competitive, while staff could often find education-based roles offering similar pay and benefits with less commercial pressure.

That is why, when I speak to schools or trusts considering expanding their IT team to generate income, I urge extreme caution.

The idea is appealing: strengthen your internal team, share expertise with neighbouring schools and generate additional revenue for the trust.

But an IT managed service provider is a complex business. It brings commercial, operational, financial, employment, contractual and reputational risks that are easy to underestimate.

The school or trust starting the service may not initially understand the scale of those risks. Once leadership changes, priorities shift or the true cost becomes visible, the service can quickly be restricted or closed.

Schools working together is a good thing.

Schools supporting other schools is a good thing.

But education is rarely the best place to build a scalable IT MSP.

When I realised I could not sit and watch years of hard work being dismantled, I moved to Concero.

One of the reasons was that Brad and James had both worked in education, as I had. They understood the sector, but they had made the decision to leave it and build an independent business, despite the personal and financial risks involved.

Looking back, that separation matters.

It gives the business the independence to invest, adapt, take decisions and build for the long term, while still retaining the sector knowledge and values that made “schools helping schools” so powerful in the first place.