The AMF UK Team
Helen Wetherall
Helen has over 30 years’ experience in all phases of education, in Children’s Services and different public and private sector organisations as facilitator and instigator of change and leader of large-scale transformation and capital programmes.
Following a successful teaching and lecturing career, Helen gained 10 years' experience in managing education services in West and South Yorkshire.
Helen went on to become Assistant Director of Children's Services where her roles included schools building programmes, school organisation, growth and pupil place planning. Helen has formed a key part of DfE commissioned Local Authority intervention teams.
Helen advises AMF clients on growth, change management, governance, finance, and performance matters.
Sarah Ferguson
Sarah is an experienced Project Manager who has spent her entire post-graduate career in education.
Sarah has worked with more than 70 schools converting to academy status and continues to support a number of MAT clients with their growth ambitions, as well as Local Authority-led change programmes and reviews.
Sarah has worked with a number of MATs nationally, including Roman Catholic and Church of England Diocesan MATs.
More recently, Sarah supported a growing MAT for 7 years as their consultant COO where she supported the group of 28 schools through the global pandemic whilst also successfully growing the Trust and implementing robust structures of compliance.
Richard Wetherall
Richard has 10 years’ solid experience in education finance at a strategic level. He has worked as a consultant CFO for a large Multi Academy Trust, delivering an overhaul in systems and processes enabling the trust to grow from 4 schools to 30 within this period.
He is currently working in a consultancy role with a number of existing and growing MATs and is undertaking Local Authority deployments for School Resource Management Adviser (SRMA) reviews.
He was involved in the Department for Education working party shaping the development of the National Funding Formula.
Richard holds full SRMA accreditation via the Department for Education and is a member of the chartered institute of bankers.
Louise Ryan
Louise is AMF's experienced Senior Safeguarding Consultant and Independent Social Worker.
Louise provides schools and Trusts with a range of safeguarding support and consultancy in the form of producing safeguarding strategies, policies or procedures, completing safeguarding compliance audits, delivering safeguarding training and workshops and offering supervision and safeguarding casework or ad-hoc advice.
Louise has over 10 years' experience within the field of child protection, both in a frontline roles and within strategic leadership, and importantly has a passion for supporting schools in developing their safeguarding offer to pupils, understanding they are often the ‘eyes and ears’ of their pupils’ lived experiences.