Charlie Baynes
CEO and Founder
Charlie founded Medhurst Communications in 1999 and has co-owned and led the business ever since, with Louise Baynes his co-owner. It remains family-owned. As CEO and Founder he holds group-level strategy, market intelligence and corporate development, and he is Programme Director for the Capital Projects business, where he owns the bid pipeline and the commercial relationship with each principal contractor. He holds Medhurst's senior vendor relationships directly, including HPE and HPE Aruba, and oversees a group that spans managed IT and infrastructure, audio visual integration, and the group's investment in education data and AI. He remains close to delivery, taking key accounts under his own management where a customer needs it.
Louise Baynes
Financial Controller
Louise is co-owner of Medhurst and a natural leader with many years of finance experience, involved in the business since Medhurst's inception. She sits on the board, steering financial and commercial decisions across the group, including pricing strategy and group-level investment, and works across Medhurst Communications, Drift IT Services, Hugh Symons Audio Visual and EdEquity AI. She leads finance and financial control, reporting revenue and gross profit against prior year and budget monthly, holding the cash and debtor position, protecting the business against bad debt, and owning budget against forecast. Financial audit and compliance sit with her.
Al Furye
Partnerships Director
Al has worked in education ICT for twenty-seven years, progressing from engineer through senior consultant to solutions architect roles on Building Schools for the Future and academy programmes. He co-founded a managed services business and has built bid and delivery teams that have delivered more than 50 Free Schools. At Medhurst he is accountable for the Managed Services and Support business and for framework, bid and proposal activity: contracted seat count and renewals, service performance against service level agreement (SLA), and the frameworks Medhurst holds and wins through. He has been a Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists since 2012.
Sean Donohoe
Chief Sales Officer
Sean has spent twenty-six years in education technology, starting in schools sales in 2000 and going on to lead national sales functions, commercial turnarounds and framework strategy across three education technology businesses before joining Medhurst in 2026. He is accountable for commercial strategy, new business and customer retention, and marketing across the group. He has built channel functions from scratch, moved businesses from transactional selling to annuity revenue, and held framework positions with Crown Commercial Service, YPO and CPC.
Craig Bellord
Head of Projects
Craig leads project delivery across the group and is the programme lead on Medhurst's Capital Programmes work. He has worked in education IT for twenty-one years, first as a school IT technician and then as a school IT Manager, and joined Medhurst in 2010 as a Solutions Architect before taking over the Projects department in 2022. He owns the technical response on major bids, sits on the Change Advisory Board, and reports delivery performance and capacity to the board each month.
Dave Smith
Operations Director
Dave joined Medhurst in 2000, just months after the company was founded, and has played a key role in its growth ever since. As Operations Director he is responsible for operational performance, compliance and business governance across the Group. He leads the compliance framework, including the management and continual improvement of the ISO certifications, health and safety, environmental initiatives, supplier governance and regulatory compliance, and he also holds human resources and facilities. With more than two decades at Medhurst, Dave provides the structure, assurance and oversight that keep the Group safe, compliant, efficient and ready to support its customers.
Dave Bartlett
Technical Director
Dave has been Medhurst's Technical Director for twenty years, having come into the business from a systems engineering background. He sets technical strategy and engineering standards across the group: what we design, what we standardise on, and what we will not put into a school. He owns the product roadmap alongside our cyber security and emerging services, and the vendor certifications that sit behind our accreditations.
Gareth Davies
Head of Systems
Gareth has been with Medhurst for twenty years and runs the internal systems the service depends on: the service management platform, the workflow that moves work between sales, projects and support, and the reporting that tells us whether we are meeting our commitments. When a customer gets a consistent answer from three different people at Medhurst, that is usually Gareth's work behind it.
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