Securing financial stability and fair benefits for Edinburgh Academy

With over 20 years of experience and partnerships with around 100 independent schools, we specialise in supporting schools through complex pension and benefits challenges. Each school’s needs are unique, and we tailor solutions to ensure financial sustainability while maintaining staff engagement and wellbeing.

We partnered with The Edinburgh Academy to help assess and mitigate long-term financial risks. We particularly focussed on ensuring that their wider benefits and total rewards offering, including pensions, and specifically the uncertainty of Scottish Teachers’ Superannuation Scheme 2015 (STPS), remained fair, flexible, sustainable, and affordable for both the teachers and the school.

Through a collaborative, three-strand approach - covering teacher pensions, operational staff pensions, and broader benefits - we supported the school in balancing cost control with staff retention, talent attraction, and long-term financial stability and resilience.

The Edinburgh Academy share their thoughts on working with us below:

"We chose to work with BW because Katy led the bid and through her sheer professionalism and technical knowledge, she gave us the reassurance that they were the right partner to guide us through this process. Katy’s advice has always been excellent and extremely well considered so that it fits in with us an organisation, and this has enabled us to have a very successful consultation with staff and subsequently a launch of the new alternative pension scheme for our teachers. At all stages of this process, Katy’s advice has been invaluable. Just as important has been her ability to speak to all staff and explain complex issues so that everybody can understand them; it has made a huge difference."