Richard has over 18 years experience in the Audio Visual and ICT markets.

Richard’s first experience was in the private sector Audio Visual market, working for the same company for just over 10 years where he rapidly became a manager for a large region. In 2003 Richard decided to change direction and peruse his passion for ICT and has been working in the Educational ICT market ever since.

Being the husband of a teacher and hearing about the lack of ICT support within primary schools at the time, Richard found work in a number of Surrey & Croydon schools, acting as their ICT Technician/Network Manager. Although this role initially involved supporting the school’s entire curriculum ICT systems.Richard soon became responsible for the school’s Information Management Systems (IMS) as well and carried out general maintenance as well as all Capita SIMS upgrades and successfully managed the migration from SIMS to SIMS.net. SIMS is Capita’s Information Management Systems software and used in over 80% of schools in the UK. Working closely with staff at all levels he became involved in many other tasks, such as maintaining school websites, managing ICT projects & purchases, creating schools prospectus as well as teaching ICT to students.

In 2006 Richard started work for Croydon Council as a Support Officer. This gave him further experience of supporting SIMS.net and a full understanding of the importance of Information Management Systems (IMS) within schools, including their practical use by staff. Here Richard had the responsibility of supporting the admin systems, and in some cases the curriculum systems, of up-to 19 schools, both primary and secondary. The job, although heavily geared towards supporting SIMS, also involved maintaining schools servers/networks and installing new software and hardware.

In 2007 Richard was approached by Matrix and eventually took on the new role of Director of IMS services. Managing an experienced and rapidly expanding IMS support team, Richard’s responsibilities now involve supporting IMS products such as SIMS across a number of local authorities. His duties now entail developing and managing the service, and most importantly, helping to support schools.

Working for Matrix, Richard feels that he is finally in a job where he can help schools expand their use of Management Information systems. Richard can now work within a company to support schools with the greatly under-appreciated work that they do and with the ever increasing government demands put upon them and to help improve learning and teaching.

Richard has dedicated most of his working life to helping people in some way or another, which is why he is a strong advocate in the Matrix ethos Helping Schools Take Control of ICT. Although Matrix is a private company it has to make a profit and Richard believes that this is not done at the expense of schools. Instead Matrix aims to provide excellent services to help support schools and improve their understanding of ICT, so that they can take ownership and fully utilise the resources at their disposal.