Supporting Educators & Schools To Thrive
Give Your Teachers Their Time Back. The Rest Follows.
The Practice
Thrive Education Consulting works with independent, Catholic and Anglican schools in three areas: curriculum and assessment, digital technologies and AI, and the administrative work teachers absorb in their own time. We advise rather than direct. Our aim is to strengthen what your staff already do, and to leave behind plans, templates and processes the school can put to use straight away.
See clearly. Think deeply. Move forward.
Practical, research-informed consultancy that builds capability, clarity and confidence for learning in a changing world.
01What Changes
Four Things Your School Gets Back.
Hours Back Into Teaching
Planning, moderation and reporting stop being rebuilt from scratch each year. The time returns to your staff.
A Clear Position On AI
Policy, guardrails and staff confidence in the area schools are least prepared for and under the most pressure from.
Curriculum That Holds Up
Whole school plans, mapped units and rubrics built from the standards, ready to teach rather than finished the weekend before.
Staff Who Want To Stay
Lower administrative load, better onboarding, and capability that remains with your people after we leave.
20+
Years teaching Years 3 to 12, across Australia, London and Kent
2
Curriculum authorities worked inside: ACARA and the QCAA
Prep to 12
Curriculum, technologies and AI across every phase of schooling
Open &
Honest
How the introductory meeting runs, before any scope or fee is discussed
02Why This Work
The Gap Is Already Being Paid For.
The difference between a well resourced school and a stretched one is rarely commitment. It is time and money. Schools that can afford specialist capacity on staff buy it. Schools that cannot absorb the same work through teachers’ unpaid hours and stretched expertise.
We start from the position that your staff are already doing their best. The job is not to tell a school it is failing. It is to improve the tools and processes available, at a fraction of the time and cost it would take to build the same capability alone.
Costs A School Already Carries
- Training a new teacher through university
- Onboarding that teacher into your systems and culture
- Turnover: recruitment, lost institutional knowledge, disruption to students
- The downstream cost sitting in your wellbeing and attrition data
Advisory support is not an added expense. It is a faster, lower cost way to close a capability gap the school is already funding in other forms.
03The Evidence
The Load Is Measured, Not Imagined.
The OECD and Australia’s own workforce data put precise figures on the hours teachers work and where those hours go. Australia sits near the top of both tables. This is the baseline an engagement is designed to move.
The Working Week
Average weekly hours for lower secondary teachers
The third longest working week in the OECD.
Where The Hours Go
Teaching against everything else, per week
20 h teaching · 26.4 h everything else
22.7 h teaching · 18.3 h everything else
Australian teachers teach fewer hours than the OECD average. The excess sits entirely outside the classroom.
Administrative Tasks Alone
Hours per week on administration
The fourth highest administrative load in the OECD.
26%
Of full-time Australian teachers worked 60 hours or more a week during term.
69%
Say administrative work is a major source of stress. That is the third highest rate internationally.
1 in 3
Teachers and leaders are unsure they will stay in the profession until retirement.
Teachers came to this profession to teach, not to wear a different hat for every hour of the day. Thrive was founded to change these numbers.
Sources: OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) 2024, lower secondary teachers; AITSL Australian Teacher Workforce Data, National Trends: Teacher Workforce 2023, a survey of 50,556 educators.
04The Economics
The Saving Is Larger Than The Fee.
Every engagement is scoped so that the hours and costs it removes exceed what it costs to run, in the term it is delivered and in every year that follows. That test is applied before you commit, not after. Where the numbers do not clear it, we say so and reduce the scope or decline the work.
What The School Pays Today
Absorbed, Recurring, Uncosted
- Teacher hours spent planning, moderating and reporting outside load
- Leadership time spent building capability the school does not yet hold
- Replacing a teacher who leaves: recruitment, induction, lost knowledge
- A specialist salary and superannuation, where the role is filled internally
- Work repeated each year because the process was never written down
What An Engagement Costs
Fixed, Bounded & Final
- One fee, agreed in writing before any work begins
- No salary, no superannuation, no recruitment, no ongoing commitment
- Delivered inside a defined window that suits your calendar
- Templates and processes the school keeps, reuses and owns
- Capability that stays with your staff after we leave
The Return
In The First Term
Nobody starts a unit from a blank document. Nobody rewrites a rubric that already exists somewhere. Nobody loses an evening looking for the file that was on the shared drive last year. Those hours come back inside the same term, to every teacher the change touches.
Every Year After
The plans, templates and processes stay in the school. Term 1 next year opens on a finished document rather than an empty one, and when a teacher moves on, what they knew stays behind. The fee is paid once. The hours come back every year.
One Engagement, Five Years
Illustrative
Paid once, in year one. The processes it leaves behind keep returning hours every year they are used.
Weigh the fee against one year of the hours it gives back and it is the smaller figure. Weigh it against five and there is not much left to weigh.
We only propose work that pays for itself inside the first term and keeps paying every year after. If an engagement cannot clear that bar, we will say so before you commit.
05The Thrive Difference
You Will Not Find This Anywhere Else.
Thrive was founded to change the way Australian schools work, not at the margins but at the level of how the work itself is done. Teaching should be the job, not one hat among many. Curriculum built once and reused. A settled position on AI. Administrative weight carried by systems rather than by teachers’ evenings.
No other consultancy in Australia holds the combination behind it: two decades in Australian and UK classrooms, curriculum authority experience inside both ACARA and the QCAA, and specialist depth in the Technologies learning area, where AI is pressing hardest. Other firms can quote for the same scope. They cannot staff it with this.
Classroom & Authority
The standards, taught in schools and written at the authority. Judgement from both ends of the same problem, in one adviser.
The Technologies Learning Area
The specialisation almost no consultancy carries, and the first place the pressure of AI lands.
Australian, By Design
Built around the Australian Curriculum and Queensland senior syllabuses, never adapted from an overseas playbook.
The scarcity behind that claim is national, and it is measured.
44%
Of Technologies teachers nationally are teaching outside their area of qualification. The highest rate of any learning area in Australia.
2 in 3
Teachers report struggling to deliver the Digital Technologies Curriculum in their classrooms.
72%
Say they do not receive enough support to teach it. The expertise schools need most is the expertise in shortest supply.
And the remedy is documented just as thoroughly as the problem.
Australia’s own research names the fix: whole school curriculum plans and shared banks of quality materials, exactly what an engagement builds and leaves behind. Building them takes specialist time schools do not have, applied by expertise the workforce data says barely exists. Holding both at once is what makes Thrive the only option.
6 h
Spent by the typical full‑time teacher every week sourcing and creating materials from scratch. One in four spend more than ten.
500 h
To build a year of curriculum material for a single subject. Built once, then kept, that cost never repeats.
15%
Of teachers have a shared bank of quality curriculum materials for all their classes. The rest start from a blank page.
86%
Report they do not have enough time for high quality lesson planning.
3 h
Returned to every teacher, every week, in schools where a shared materials bank exists. The system an engagement leaves behind.
9 in 10
Teachers say shared, high quality materials would give them more time to teach well. That is the work we do.
Sources: AITSL Australian Teacher Workforce Data 2023; ACS and ANU Tech Policy Design Centre, Tech Skills for the Next Generation; Grattan Institute, Ending the Lesson Lottery, 2022 survey of 2,243 Australian teachers and school leaders.
Schools that want this combination have exactly one place to find it.
06What We Do
Three Pillars. Engage One, Or All Three.
01
Curriculum & Assessment
Whole school plans, mapped units and the templates that make them repeatable, so planning becomes a system rather than a rediscovery each year.
- Whole school curriculum and assessment plans
- Curriculum mapping across subjects and phases
- Units of work, assessment tasks and culminating tasks
- Task specific rubrics built from standards and elaborations
- Planning templates for Junior, Secondary and Senior phases
- Australian Curriculum guidance, including General Capabilities and Cross Curriculum Priorities
You keep a documented plan and a template set your faculties can run again next year.
02
Digital Technologies & AI
Policy, guardrails and staff capability for the area schools are least confident in and under the most pressure from. Written to be used, not filed.
- Digital Technologies policy and school guidelines
- AI strategy, policy and direction
- Assessment policy alignment and academic integrity guardrails
- An AI assessment scale and an AI judgement tool
- Staff and student device management
- Professional learning in digital literacy, file and resource management
- “Using AI” staff sessions: what it is, how to use it, and privacy, security and bias
You keep a position on AI your staff understand, and guardrails that hold up under scrutiny.
03
Staff Capability & Sustainability
The reason the first two pillars exist. Less administrative load, better onboarding, and processes the school keeps running without us.
- Reducing administrative load and giving teachers back time
- Onboarding and early career teacher support
- Retention and succession planning
- Connections between schools and educational bodies
You keep processes that run without us, and staff who are not carrying the load alone.
07Where We Look First
We Ask How The Work Actually Happens.
Not whether a document exists, but how a unit really gets written, how long moderation really takes, and where the hours go that nobody has counted. Ten areas, worked through in conversation with leadership, middle leaders and teachers, with the difficult ones handled as a review of processes rather than of people.
01
School Direction & Expectations
Where leadership is heading, and what staff understand that to mean in practice.
02
Curriculum Planning Process
Who writes a unit, from what starting point, and how much is rebuilt from scratch each year.
03
Unit Development & Delivery Readiness
Whether a unit arrives ready to teach, or is finished the weekend before it runs.
04
Assessment Development
How tasks and rubrics are written, checked against the standards, and reused across a faculty.
05
Marking, Moderation & Reporting
The real hours inside a marking period, and the points where moderation stalls.
06
Meetings & Collaboration
What your meetings decide, what they only report, and what could have been a document.
07
Systems, Platforms & Resource Management
How many places a teacher looks to find one file, and who keeps those places current.
08
Workload & Working Hours
When the work actually happens, and which parts of it sit outside paid load.
09
Staff Capability & Confidence
Where staff feel underprepared, and which professional learning has not landed.
10
AI & Digital Workload Reduction
Which tasks AI can take on safely, which it cannot, and where the policy needs to be clear.
What You Get Back
A short written summary: what is costing your staff hours, what would return them, and the order to do it in. Yours to act on, with or without us.
08How We Work
Fixed Scope. Fixed Fee. Something You Can Use.
The introductory meeting is a conversation, not a pitch. If there is nothing worth doing, we will say so. Where there is, the scope is written down before anything starts, and we will tell you plainly which fixes you should handle internally rather than buy.
- 01An introductory meeting to work out what would genuinely help
- 02An engagement letter: services, deliverables, conditions and terms
- 03The work, delivered inside windows that suit your calendar
- 04A closing review, and an honest answer about what comes next
Pricing is fixed scope, fixed fee, quoted after the introductory meeting. We will only ever offer a service that proactively benefits the school.
09Privacy & Security
Confidential By Design.
Working inside a school means being trusted with how its people work. That trust is engineered for, not assumed. Every interaction with a school is treated as valuable, and protected accordingly.
Encrypted Throughout
Every document and conversation an engagement touches is encrypted, and handled in compliance with ISO 27001.
Anonymous To Our Own Systems
Staff and school information is de‑identified before it is stored. Our own systems cannot connect what we hold to a person or to a school.
No Personal Records
No teacher’s name, age or background is recorded or kept. The work examines processes, never people.
Retention To A Standard
Anything retained is held in compliance with ISO 27001, and only for as long as the engagement needs it.
10Who You Work With
Beth Claydon
Founder & Lead Adviser
Twenty years teaching Years 3 to 12 across Australia, London and Kent, fourteen of them at St Hilda’s School, where she built and led St Hilda’s@Home, an online learning program running well before remote learning was routine.
Plenty of consultants have been teachers. Some have worked at a curriculum authority. Very few have done both, and almost none inside the Technologies learning area: the area schools are least confident in, and the one under the most pressure from AI.
In practice that means advice grounded in both ends of the same problem. What an eight week unit actually takes to deliver on a Tuesday, and how ACARA intended an achievement standard to be read.
Selected Experience
- Curriculum Officer & Mentor, Digital Technologies in FocusACARA, three years
- Senior Project OfficerQueensland Curriculum and Assessment Authority
- Deputy Director of Teaching & LearningA.B. Paterson College
- Head of Digital Literacy & STEAM, Prep to 12A.B. Paterson College
- Technologies & Innovation SpecialistCoomera Anglican College
- Head of St Hilda’s@HomeSt Hilda’s School
- Apple Distinguished Educator
11In Their Words
Awaiting Written Quotes“
Quote to be added: what changed for the teaching staff.
“
Quote to be added: the hours a single process gave back.
“
Quote to be added: how the AI position was settled.
Happy Teachers = Happy Schools. Start With A Conversation.
An introductory meeting costs nothing and commits you to nothing. We will tell you what we think is worth doing, and what is not.