How DETENTION Founder, Amanda Peake, earned her seat at your table, not through theory but through battle-tested strategy.

When you're responsible for moving the needle on school brand, engagement, enrolments, fundraising, or community trust, you don’t need fluff, you need strategy that’s been proven to work in schools like yours. That’s why it matters who’s behind DETENTION. The person driving your strategy should understand the pressure, the politics, the blockers, and the human complexity of the job — because they’ve lived it. Amanda Peake hasn’t just studied the business of education, she’s rebuilt it from the inside, over and over again. What follows isn’t a backstory. It’s the reason DETENTION works.

Amanda has spent a good part of her life in the business side of education, learning, then leading enrolments (domestic and international), shaping school strategy, rebranding schools, rebuilding community trust, reigniting alumni, and most recently, raising money. She’s worked inside executive teams, presented to Boards, launched campaigns, fixed what others gave up on, and helped schools get unstuck.

Amanda understands education as a product, not a widget, not a transaction, but a high-emotion, high-stakes investment that parents feel more than they rationalise. It’s not like selling shoes or software. You’re selling identity, aspiration, and belonging. You’re selling their child’s future.

And here’s the twist, education is a product we’ve all used. Everyone’s been to school. But just because you once sat in a classroom doesn’t mean you understand how the whole machine works. That’s the danger: mistaking familiarity for expertise.

And for a while, she walked away from all of it.

Not because she was done, but because she wanted to go deeper. She earned a teaching degree — her magic wand moment. Or maybe her wooden ruler moment (yes, the kind you’d get cracked with in old-school detention).

That move gave her something most in this space don’t have, a raw, inside-out view of what happens when the ‘product’ meets the ‘customer’ in real time. The classroom isn’t theory. It’s pressure. It’s politics. It’s pedagogy, parents, and students colliding, constantly.

Now Amanda brings that lived insight into every strategy she builds. Because the truth is this:
If you don’t understand what happens after the enrolment is signed, if you don’t understand the humans interacting with your product every day, then you don’t understand the business of education.

Engagement doesn’t end when the sale is made. That’s when it actually begins.

So, when she talks about strategy now, Amanda is not just speaking from a boardroom lens. She gets the human side, the friction, the fatigue, the potential.

She’s been the marketer, the enrolments lead, the fundraiser, the teacher, the fixer, the bridge-builder. And right now, she’s the one who’s decided to say the quiet parts out loud.

You don’t need permission to land in DETENTION.

You just need the guts to rethink what education can be when we stop playing it safe.

Welcome to the room. Let’s make it loud.