Adastrum is a London executive search and leadership advisory firm. We appoint chief executives, chief operating officers and technology and transformation leadership into universities, EdTech businesses and investor-backed education groups.
Education has become two businesses wearing one word. A university runs on governance, public funding and a mission older than anyone in the room. An EdTech company runs on product, investors and a clock. The leadership each one needs is not interchangeable.
Talk to us about a senior appointmentWe are retained by governing bodies, vice-chancellors, chief executives and investors to appoint the executive leadership of an education organisation. Retained means we are engaged to solve a defined problem rather than to fill a vacancy: we map the whole relevant market, approach leaders confidentially, assess them against the problem, and stay involved through the offer and the first hundred days.
In higher education that work is as much about governance as about the candidate. A council, a senate and an executive team hold different kinds of authority, and an appointment that ignores how consent is built will stall long before anyone says so out loud. In EdTech and investor-backed groups the constraint is the opposite one: pace, and whether the leader has run at this size before.
Education briefs arrive in very different language depending on who writes them. They tend to reduce to the same handful of underlying leadership problems.
We are retained to appoint permanent and interim executive leadership, including
Our work is the executive leadership that runs and transforms an education business or institution. We do not place teaching staff, lecturers, academic or faculty appointments, headteachers or school leadership roles, we do not work below director level, and we are not a contingent agency. If that is what you need, we will gladly point you to someone better placed to help.
The scope of a mandate, in short. Where a brief falls outside it we will say so at the first conversation rather than three weeks in.
| Scope | What we do |
|---|---|
| Roles in scope | Chief Executive, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Commercial Officer. Chief Technology Officer, Chief Information Officer and Chief Product Officer. Chief Digital Officer and Chief Data Officer. Director of Finance. Directors of Digital Transformation, Programme and Change. Board, governor, non-executive and advisory appointments. |
| Roles out of scope | Teaching staff, lecturers, academic and faculty appointments, headteachers and school leadership roles, and anything below director level. We are not a contingent agency. |
| Seniority | Director level and above, up to and including the board. |
| Engagement basis | Retained. We are not a contingent agency and do not work on percentage-of-placement terms. |
| Typical timeline | Shortlist four to six weeks from briefing. Eight to twelve weeks from briefing to accepted offer. Interim leaders can be in the seat within days. |
Five stages, run the same way on every mandate, with the governance work a university appointment specifically requires built into each one.
Stage 1
We establish what the appointment has to change and who has to consent to it. In a university that second question is not administrative: council, senate and executive hold different authority, and a candidate needs to know which of them they will actually be answering to. We will challenge a specification that describes a mandate the institution has not agreed to give anyone.
Stage 2
We map inside education and well beyond it. Some of the strongest leaders we place into institutions built their judgement in other industries and bring a perspective the sector had stopped generating for itself. We approach each personally, and we are candid with them about the governance they would be joining, because that is what most often decides whether a good candidate stays interested.
Stage 3
Assessment is a subject-matter conversation between peers, not a scripted competency exercise. For education appointments we weight how a candidate builds a mandate rather than assumes one, and how they behave when a decision has to be made without full consensus. Each shortlisted candidate receives a written assessment mapped against your problem.
Stage 4
We present three to five candidates with our recommendation and the trade-offs between them. In higher education this is the stage where a panel is most likely to choose the candidate who unsettles nobody. We will say plainly when we think that is what is happening, and what it will cost.
Stage 5
We manage the offer and stay close to the leader and the sponsor through the first hundred days. A leader arriving from industry meets the institution's decision-making rhythm in the first month, and that is the moment where an otherwise strong appointment is most likely to lose confidence in itself.
A strong CV from a respected institution or a well-funded platform is a safe-looking choice in a board pack. It tells you what someone has been part of. It does not tell you how they will lead when a programme slips, a funding round moves, or a governing body loses patience with a timeline that was always optimistic.
Working with the social psychologist Dr Ian Stewart, we assess how a leader operates when the room is calm and what they reach for when it is not. Those defaults are developable rather than fixed, which is the point: a leader who can see their own can regulate it, and an institution that knows about it can support them. It is the difference between an appointment that compounds and one that quietly comes apart around month twelve.
We place across sectors on purpose. The pattern recognition that changes an outcome usually travels better from outside an industry than from within it, because people inside a sector have often arrived at the same answers as one another.
A leader who has already turned a services business into a product business, or already run technology at pace under real accountability, carries that judgement whatever industry earned it. We map inside and outside education and let the problem decide. What we will not do is put forward someone who cannot read an institution, whatever their commercial record.
Adastrum brings twenty years of appointing senior leaders into complex organisations, a behavioural assessment method developed with the social psychologist Dr Ian Stewart, and our Meta Team programme, which has worked with leadership teams at organisations including Nasdaq, Novartis, HSBC, Unilever and EQT.
No. We appoint the executive leadership that runs and transforms an education business or institution: chief executives, chief operating officers, chief technology and digital officers, and transformation directors. We do not place teaching staff, faculty or academic appointments, headteachers, or school leadership roles.
Universities and higher-education institutions, EdTech and learning-technology businesses, and investor-backed education and training groups. The common thread is an organisation in growth or structural change where one senior appointment carries a disproportionate share of the plan.
The service is specialist; the firm is not, deliberately. Our specialism is leadership: defining the problem an organisation needs to solve and assessing how a leader will behave under pressure. That method travels across sectors, which is frequently why it works inside education.
Yes, and we treat it as the central constraint rather than a detail. A council, a senate and an executive team do not decide things the way a corporate board does, and an appointment that ignores that dynamic tends to stall long before anyone admits it has. Managing it, on both the institution's side and the candidate's, is part of the work.
Most mandates reach shortlist four to six weeks after briefing and run eight to twelve weeks to accepted offer. Institutions with formal committee approval at the final stage should expect the back end to take longer, and we plan for that rather than discovering it.
Yes. Where you cannot wait for a full retained search, we place experienced interim leaders within days to hold a function steady or deliver a defined programme with a clear end point.
Before your next senior appointment, one question is worth sitting with. Are you about to hire someone who knows what good looks like, or someone who has actually built it?
If that is a conversation worth having, it is exactly the one we welcome.
Talk to us about a senior appointmentObservations from twenty years of appointing leaders into complex organisations: what separates an appointment that compounds from one that quietly comes apart, why succession plans drift towards the most visible candidate, and what a board ought to ask before it signs off the brief.
The Collaborator is the schema you appoint to make a divided organisation move as one. It is also the one most likely to keep seeking agreement long after the moment for agreement has gone. The most dangerous phrase in a senior team is not “I disagree.” It is “let’s get everyone aligned first.” I watched a leader run a good business into a wasted quarter on that phrase, and almost nobody in the room could see it happ
The most expensive senior appointment I have watched fail had the best roadmap I have ever seen. I mean that sincerely. It was a genuinely impressive piece of thinking. Every workstream mapped, every dependency identified, governance and sequencing and risk all accounted for. The board saw it in month three and applauded. He was still refining it in month fourteen, when they let him go.
The Commander is the schema you appoint in a crisis. It is also the one you have to watch once the crisis has passed. There is a phrase you hear in big organisations when nothing is moving. "It's just how things get done here." Say it out loud and it sounds like culture. Listen properly and it is something sharper. It means someone at the top is commanding, and everyone below has quietly learned to wait.
The board thought they had found the perfect CEO. Two successful exits. A scaled multinational division. References that read like a character witness: decisive, commercially sharp, a natural leader. In the interview he was confident, fluent, convincing on growth and culture and transformation. The appointment was unanimous. Twelve months later the same board was negotiating his exit. Revenue targets had been missed.
There’s one question almost every HR-led interview process insists on. “Tell me about a time you failed.” At junior level, it sometimes earns its keep. At C-suite, it’s a junk question. And it’s almost always the wrong thing to ask in the room. I’ll explain why I won’t ask it. And then I’ll tell you what I ask instead.
Most succession planning assumes someone is ready to step up. But what happens when the obvious successor is the one who leaves? A look at why heir apparent plans fail, the real cost of an unplanned leadership transition, and how boards build genuine continuity.
