What makes a school acquirable?

Every Tuesday, our partnership team reads three or four schools' financial statements before lunch. Most of them are excellent. None of them are acquirable in the way we mean it.

What 'acquirable' really means

An acquirable school, in our framing, is one where the conditions for stewardship already exist. The numbers are honest. The head sleeps. Parents who have known the school for ten years would still send their second child.

That is rarer than it sounds. We have seen schools with strong academic results whose finances are kept upright by personal guarantees from a single trustee, and schools with thirty pristine years of accounts whose head is preparing to leave with no successor. Neither is acquirable to us — not without a degree of intervention we are unwilling to commit to.

The three conditions

• A head whose plan extends past their own tenure.
• Numbers that survive a ten-year stress test on enrolment, fees, and capital.
• A board that has separated governance from sentiment.

When all three are present, partnership becomes an exercise in custodianship rather than rescue. That is the only kind of partnership we want.

“We meet the head before we meet the seller.”

If the school is acquirable in our sense, the head meeting tells us within twenty minutes. The numbers can be checked over weeks; conviction takes longer than that, but it always begins on the day.