We’re delighted to welcome George Serls to the team as our Public Sector Pension Specialist.
George brings a career’s worth of payroll and pensions expertise to Ascend, with particular depth in the education sector, where pension schemes like Teachers’ Pensions and the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) bring a level of complexity that catches many payroll teams out.
“George and I have worked together before, and I’ve seen first-hand what he brings to payroll and pensions teams. He has a rare combination of deep technical knowledge and a genuine drive to make processes simpler for clients.
Education pension schemes are notoriously complicated, and George is exactly the kind of person who thrives on getting them right. I couldn’t be happier to have him on board.”
Why education pensions matter
Education is one of the most demanding sectors when it comes to pensions. Schools, academies and multi-academy trusts often have to navigate Teachers’ Pensions alongside LGPS, each with its own reporting requirements, deadlines and quirks. Add in national changes such as Monthly Data Collection (MDC) and Monthly Contribution Reconciliations (MCR), and it’s easy to see why so many payroll teams find education pensions a headache.
Some providers leave clients to work through these complexities largely on their own. We don’t think that’s good enough. A managed payroll service should take the pensions burden off a client’s hands entirely, not just process the numbers and hope for the best.
Getting education pensions right isn’t just a compliance box to tick. It means accurate, on-time contributions, fewer costly errors, and confidence that the scheme is being run properly on behalf of staff who are relying on it for their future.
George’s experience
George’s career in payroll started almost by accident. With a finance background, George was promoted into a payroll role (the way so many of us find our way into payroll!). With no prior payroll background, he inherited a system still running on floppy disks and set about finding something fit for purpose. That early problem-solving led to him becoming Group Payroll Manager, and later taking on responsibility for pensions too, at a company that grew from 150 employees locally to 6,000 as a FTSE-250 organisation during his time there.
From payroll and pensions, George moved into employee benefits and rewards, working across both the public and private not-for-profit sectors. In 2015, he joined a specialist payroll and pensions provider, where his role quickly grew beyond day-to-day pensions administration into automation and process innovation.
It was here that George developed a particular focus on education clients, standardising and automating processes so that business volumes could grow without needing to grow headcount alongside them. He went on to play a key role in national pension initiatives, working closely with the Local Government Association on things like the McCloud age discrimination remedy, as well as Teachers’ Pensions and helping clients convert to MDC, as well as navigating the ongoing shift to MCR.
“Pensions have a reputation for being dry, but there’s a real satisfaction in knowing a scheme is running exactly as it should,” George says of his approach to the work. “In education, particularly, getting it right the first time saves everyone a huge amount of pain further down the line.”
Why Ascend?
In his role as Pension Specialist, Education, George will be setting up and refining processes for working with the range of pension schemes Ascend’s education clients rely on, bringing the same focus on efficiency and standardisation that has defined his career so far.
