Selling an educational institution: deciding what future you make possible

The decision behind a sale

A sale is usually framed as a negotiation about price and about what is worth preserving. But preserving is not enough as a criterion. An institution can keep its name, its leadership and its discourse while losing educational quality. It can also change profoundly and strengthen its purpose.

That is why the question I put to an owner is not only what will survive the sale, but what deserves continuity, what needs to evolve and what conditions will make that possible. Answering it takes four questions, and each one is best answered before the buyer does.

1. What are we really transferring?

What changes hands is not a building or an enrolment portfolio. It is a purpose, a set of capabilities, relationships, a culture and a way of learning. Its value does not lie in each piece separately, but in how they hold each other up.

To understand it I use Systemic Learning Architecture: the chain that runs from purpose to educational model, graduate profile, curriculum, experiences, assessment, evidence and impact, read across the layers of governance, organisation and classroom. Before presenting the institution to anyone, we examine it together:

• Which relationships between purpose, organisation, curriculum, assessment and culture sustain learning today.
• Where there are contradictions between the model that is declared and the experience students actually live.
• What depends on specific people and what is sustained by the structure.
• Which governance decisions would affect those relationships if they changed.

2. What needs continuity and what needs transformation?

Not everything inherited is essential. Some practices sustain the purpose; others persist out of habit, and some weaken it. Telling them apart changes the conversation with any buyer: it stops being a list of things to protect and becomes a well-founded proposal for the future.

That distinction also makes it possible to recognise what the institution has not been able to transform with its current resources, and what a new owner could make possible.

A risk a financial reading would miss

A buyer proposes to increase teaching hours and reduce the time teachers have for coordination. The decision improves an efficiency indicator. But in many institutions that time is what sustains co-teaching and the interdisciplinary projects on which the educational proposal rests.

Before accepting it, you need to understand what learning depends on that coordination and what the consequences of changing it will be: for students’ experiences, for assessment and for teachers’ commitment. Sometimes the decision will be reasonable under other conditions; sometimes it will weaken precisely what gave the project its value. Seeing that relationship in time is what makes it possible to negotiate with judgement.

3. Which buyer can develop that future?

The point is not to find the buyer who will change the least, but the one best able to develop what the project needs. A strategic education group, an investment fund and a school network tend to decide very differently about time, people, investment and model.

• Contrasting each candidate’s strategy with the real needs of the project, not only with what exists today.
• Translating that strategy into concrete decisions: what it would do with the teaching staff, the curriculum, assessment and investment.
• Identifying which conditions are worth agreeing before signing to make that future possible, and defining them in educational terms so that the legal advisors can formalise them.

4. How will the next stage be built?

Teachers, students, leadership and families are not only people to be informed. They are the ones who will build the institution’s future, and a change of ownership without their participation tends to generate resistance or disengagement.

• Governance: who decides what during the transition and in the first years.
• Participation: how the community is listened to, how it takes part in the decisions that affect it and how legitimacy for change is built.
• Teacher capabilities: what teachers will need to develop to sustain the project in the new stage.
• Monitoring learning: how to know whether the decisions taken strengthen or weaken what students learn.

How I work

With absolute confidentiality. In each transaction I work for one party only. My work covers the educational, cultural and institutional dimension; the financial and legal dimensions remain with the M&A advisors and lawyers you already work with, and I coordinate with them.

My experience comes from almost a decade supporting the transformation and integration of educational institutions across three continents, including the incorporation of institutions into education networks. From there I bring what a financial reading does not make visible: what sustains the educational project and what conditions it needs to evolve after a change of ownership.

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