Customer Stories

We caught up with Dave Foulkes, Business Manager for our fantastic client Caldew School:

‘I previously worked in the Civil Service for 17 years managing admin support for the Ministry of Agriculture, dealing with Foot and Mouth Disease, BSE and Swine Fever.

I had a change in career joining Solway Community School and I then started working for Caldew School, a secondary school with sixth form.

Caldew School is a strong, caring school offering a wide and varied curriculum with excellent achievements for all.

We have worked with David Allen since engaging with them following conversion to Academy status in 2011.

We wanted to work with David Allen as they offer a comprehensive accountancy and audit service, enabling us to fulfil our legal obligations as an Academy.

Accountancy and audit are long and laborious processes.  The David Allen team facilitate this efficiently and very effectively.  The time and advice provided by David Allen is essential to the smooth operation of our financial procedures.  The payroll team can be relied upon to provide a timely and extremely accurate service which again is essential to the school’s operations.

We have worked closely with Sarah Graves, who is a superb member of the team.  Reliable, accurate and approachable.

During the Covid pandemic, and, following guidance, we were closed for long periods of time except for vulnerable students and students of parents that were key workers. From a financial perspective, the income generated through catering and particularly, lettings were drastically reduced to zero during those closures.

The requirement to provide remote learning was a huge success, implemented at incredibly short notice. Our aim then, now, and for the future, is to ensure students continue to excel and achieve good grades.

It took time to recover from these losses, but we are now operating at full capacity in both.

David Allen will support our future goals by continuing to do what they do!’