All the education-related businesses owned by Vedior are now operating as part of a recently created subsidiary group.

The Vedior Education Recruitment Business (Verb) Group, which was launched at the beginning of the year, includes Select Education, Select Education Australasia, teachanywhere.com, Special Agent, Supreme Education and Arete Leaders.

The businesses offer a range of education-related services including the provision of supply teachers, school leaders such as headteachers, teachers for private international English- speaking schools, and an automated staffing solution.

Group chairman Bob Wicks said the formation of the Verb Group was "not about selling the name of Verb. It made sense to bring all the education businesses under one service group. Verb glues the various parts together and gains greater leverage as a business."

Wicks told Recruiter the move to consolidate the education businesses was also designed to sharpen their strategic focus, prevent overlap and provide a "big picture" of the education mar- ket to pinpoint further opportunities for organic growth.

But although he said the understanding of this market is now "huge", he admitted that creating the group hadn't been plain sailing.

"We anticipated a certain amount of resistance, and we had to extol the benefits of Verb," he said. "But now Verb is a fact, and everything we said would happen has happened."

Those promises included staff assurances that there would be no downside to the consolidation and the businesses would suffer no interruption in operations.