The Rule
You cannot evaluate a vendor well until you have named your own priority first.
One Thing Tuesday
Write the sentence before you open another brochure.
So how do we write One?
The Headteacher in Your Network
They have good intentions. They have a list of priorities. Attendance is on it. Literacy is on it. Staff wellbeing is on it. AI readiness has crept onto it since September.
Every week, three or four vendor emails land. Some look relevant. Some look interesting. Most get filed under "look at this when I have time."
Time doesn't come. The half term review meeting has another conversation about "what we should prioritise." Nothing is decided. The emails pile up.
What's missing isn't information. There's enough information. What's missing is a filter.
Because without a named priority, every vendor looks equally relevant or equally irrelevant. Every brochure needs the same amount of reading. Every decision gets deferred to a meeting that defers it further.
The schools who move this term are the ones who stopped trying to evaluate vendors and started filtering them instead.
So the question isn't whether you need support.
You already know you do.
The question is:
What specifically would change if the right support showed up?
Until you can name that, no vendor email is going to give you what you need.
Because when a vendor appears and you can see the link in seconds, something shifts.
You're not evaluating anymore.
You're solving.
Your One Thing This Tuesday:
Before you open another brochure or attend another webinar, write this sentence:
"By July, the one thing we need to have moved is ________."
Fill it in. One sentence. That becomes your filter for everything else this term.
Then, if you want to see which vendors align to what you've named.
/The Room You Don't Want to Miss
There is a £1.8 billion funding shortfall in schools. You are not imagining it. You are managing it every single day.
Every priority your leadership team names runs into the same wall. The need is real. The evidence is there. The will is there. The budget is not.
Grants take months. Applications are competitive. And even when they land, the money is ringfenced, time-limited, and gone before the impact compounds.
This is not a capacity problem. It is a structural one. And grants are not the answer to a structural problem.
This spring, we are gathering a small group of schools and vendors to design something different. In the room: vendor and school pairs working on real deployment.
An eCommerce partner bringing checkout infrastructure. A banking perspective on round-up funding. A procurement lens on tenders and social value. Hosted at one of the world's leading global tech companies in Central London.
Not a panel. Not a pitch event. A working session.
Instead of waiting for funding, funding flows through commerce: checkout round-up, bank round-up, local commerce, corporate social value. Multiple flows. One school. Traceable impact.
We are selecting 8 to 10 school and vendor pairs. If you have a vendor in mind, bring them. If you do not, we will match you. You come in with your One Big Change named. We sit down and map how it gets funded.
Applications close in 2 weeks.
Yvonne
LocaeRise
P.S. You wrote the sentence. That is further than most schools get. Do not let it sit in a notebook. Bring it to the room where it becomes a plan.