We did not set out to become a recruitment firm.
Kirsty founded Childrens House in 2005 to supply Montessori schools with materials. Twenty years later it is still a family business, and Montessori Search Partners grew out of that business rather than into it.
It started with a question we could answer
Childrens House began in 2005, supplying Montessori schools with materials. It has been a family business from the beginning and remains one; some of us by blood, the rest of us by the twenty years since.
Kirsty, who founded it, spent those years lecturing on Montessori training courses and moderating them: assessing whether other people’s training met the standard. That is an unusual vantage point. It means we came to know the Montessori community from both sides: the schools we supplied, and the Guides we helped prepare for them.
So when a school owner phoned to ask whether we knew a good Primary Guide, we usually did. We passed on a number and made the introduction. There was no charge, because there was no business; only a question we happened to be able to answer.
The introduction was free. The judgement was the work.
The recommendations turned out to be good. Good enough that schools stopped asking for names and started asking for something harder.
Was this person right for their environment? What should they be paying? How should they handle a Guide leaving mid-cycle? Should they wait for someone better, or take a strong candidate now?
Those calls grew long. They were also the most valuable thing we were doing, and the only part we were not charging for.
So we made a decision. The next Guide we introduced, we would bill for. Not for the introduction, which was never the difficult part, but for the judgement that made it worth having.
That is how Montessori Search Partners started.
Why a good recommendation is rare
A generalist recruiter can run a process. What they cannot do is sit in a classroom for twenty minutes and tell whether the adult in it understands the prepared environment, or is performing a version of Montessori learned from a manual.
A Montessori practitioner can make that judgement. What they rarely have is the method to run a search properly: to source, to assess consistently, and to tell a school something true when it is not what they hoped to hear.
We do both. It is an unusual combination, and it is the whole reason MSP exists.
We name credentials precisely
AMI, AMS, IMC, MACTE, and the levels within each. “Montessori certified” is not a qualification, and treating it as one is how a school ends up with a mismatch it discovers in October.
We say when a search is difficult
Before it starts, with reasons. We would rather decline a search than take a fee for one we cannot fill.
We tell you what we do not know
Where we do not have enough closed searches in a region to give a reliable timeline, we say so rather than inventing one.
32 countries
We have worked with Montessori schools in thirty-two countries. Our focus today is the United States, where the Montessori sector is largest and the need for rigorous search is most acute. The relationships behind this business, though, were built across two decades and several continents.
A division of Childrens House
Montessori Search Partners is a division of Childrens House, which has supplied Montessori materials to schools internationally since 2005.
That relationship is not decorative. It is why we know the schools, and why we knew the Guides before there was a business in knowing them.
Every placement affects a child’s environment for years.
That is the standard we are measured against. It is also why we would rather tell a school something they do not want to hear than fill a role badly.