About Place Group

The Schools' Buying Club is operated by Place Group. Place Group has been helping and servicing schools across the country for over a decade. As well as setting up a number of the first Free Schools, Place has also established 45 sponsored Academies and helped more than 50 schools convert to Academy status.

As Local Authority and school budget cuts became a reality, Place noticed a similar pattern emerge - and this was the fact that schools were struggling to make ends meet within the new budgetary constraints and in many cases were having to reduce headcount.  Our research showed that there was nowhere in the market place that schools could go for independent, honest and commercially focused advice.  This was the catalyst for the Schools' Buying Club which was formed to address this need.

Place has seen, and helped extricate a number of schools from unsuitable and supplier favoured contracts that schools have been tied into for years. Place has also come across numerous examples of the worst type of procurement practice imaginable - and seen schools in serious breach of EU Procurement Directives that could have led to hefty fines and termination of contracts.