About Us - Meet the Team

The PiE team are specialists in reward, salary benchmarking, and school governance, and have gained their expertise and understanding in the Education sector over several years. The team are passionate about providing the right tools and solutions to support education leaders, and governors to make a positive impact in their increasingly challenging roles.

Sharon O’Ryan, Claire Cleverley and Nina Boden know the importance of salary benchmarking as a tool for governors, headteachers and school business managers, to help them manage the pay and recruitment budgets within schools.

Sharon O'Ryan

Sharon is the founder and CEO of PiE - she is a seasoned HR professional and a Fellow of the CIPD with considerable experience in HR, salary benchmarking and school governance.

She is a reward and salary benchmarking specialist and in 2005 Sharon played a key role in establishing the Maritime HR Association, the most comprehensive and reliable worldwide salary benchmarking forum for shore-based positions in the shipping industry. Today it is still the leading maritime salary benchmarking tool and compares over 150 roles in 100 countries. Sharon has also been a School Governor for over 20 years in both primary, secondary, faith and grammar education and is currently the Chair of Governors of a large, secondary grammar school.

Sharon explains.

"During a governor's meeting several years ago, I was grappling with how best to achieve a fair and thorough review of our Headteacher's pay and reflected on how the tools I had previously created in the maritime sector would be the perfect solution. I recognised the value and professionalism that responsible independent salary benchmarking would bring not only to salary reviews in education, but also broader pay and budget related discussions we have around the governing body table."

"As more schools move away from using the national pay framework, there is less transparency of the salaries being paid. At that point I decided to put my experience of School Governance and 35 years as an HR professional with specific expertise in this field to good use and hence PiE, Pay in Education was born; a venture to provide an affordable, independent third-party solution to enable responsible salary benchmarking designed specifically for the education sector."

"Working with schools to create the PiE online platform has been really enjoyable and very rewarding to know we are providing a robust benchmarking tool to help inform decisions around pay and recruitment and manage pay transparently in line with ESFA and NGA guidelines."

Claire Cleverley

Claire is an education and training specialist with expertise in research, creating system documentation and delivering client training worldwide in the financial services and education.

Claire has worked in primary and secondary education in a variety of roles. She has worked with schools and trusts to produce the bespoke job matching framework which sits at the heart of the PiE on-line platform and ensures that job matching is completed accurately and appropriate for education.
 

Claire writes...

"Working with Sharon to make great things happen with PiE has been an amazing journey; the result is a versatile, intuitive, interactive on-line tool to assist school business managers, headteachers, CEO’s, governors and others responsible for managing pay and allowances in the education sector. My focus is to provide support using the platform to ensure you get the best possible outcome when making decisions about how to spend your salary and recruitment budgets".

"I've worked in primary and secondary education and seen a range of staffing and salary structures in operation and have been able to consider that in the framework we have built. My working life has always included training people and I enjoy providing guidance and support to ensure people get the best from the PiE platform; your satisfaction is really important to me."

"Working with Sharon tops my list of favourite projects. I've known Sharon for many years through work so when Sharon explained her vision for Pay in Education and offered me the amazing opportunity to work with her, I was thrilled. The timing in my career was perfect and I jumped at the chance. I've loved every minute and count myself lucky that I love what I do so I am always the smiley one in the office, especially when drinking coffee!"

Nina Boden

Nina has many years of experience as a teacher and member of the school senior leadership team. She has been an enthusiastic, and highly creative teacher, having had subject leader responsibility for Maths, English and Science at various stages of her teaching career.

Nina consistently delivers outstanding results and has demonstrated significant progress in pupil achievement across the curriculum, throughout the primary years. Her responsibilities have included recruiting and engaging teaching and support staff alongside budget management responsibility; this hands-on experience made Nina the perfect choice to act as one of the education advisors to the PiE team.

Nina explains...

"In addition to delivering outstanding education for pupils, there is a constant challenge for headteachers and their leadership team to seek efficiencies in an environment where budgets are already very tight. With staff costs being such a large percentage of our budget, I was intrigued to hear about the benchmarking platform the PiE team were developing."

"The research and thought behind the design of the PiE platform enables school leaders to confidently decide where to pitch salaries when recruiting and understand how to manage pay progression during salary reviews. The move away from automatic increments has resulted in a focus on managing performance related increases consistently. PiE provides the insight to help ensure that consistency."

"My experience of teaching and support staff roles and structures has enabled us to fully test the bespoke PiE job matching framework. It is proven to be robust, relevant to education and provides the sector with a very professional but affordable salary benchmarking tool."

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