Experience forged at the scale of a state. Now shared with schools across Australia.

Almost two decades working in education means William has seen what a security decision actually costs a school — a class that cannot start, a leadership team pulled away from students, a small technology team asked to carry something far larger than its capacity.

Schools also hold trust that is difficult to rebuild. Families share health, wellbeing and financial detail because they expect it to be handled carefully. When something goes wrong, the consequence is human before it is technical.

That perspective shapes every recommendation: protection has to fit the way a school actually runs, or it will not survive first contact with a school day.

For nearly a decade William led cyber security at the Victorian Department of Education, with responsibility across an ecosystem supporting more than 1,600 schools and 80,000 staff — the kind of environment where identity, access, suppliers and devices all have to be reasoned about together.

He has led major risk programs and complex cyber security initiatives, and his career spans manufacturing, multiple levels of government, higher education and multinational technology providers. More than a decade of that has been in security and risk consulting.

Scale teaches prioritisation. When you cannot do everything at once, you learn what genuinely reduces risk first — and what is only activity.

Much of what William learned at state scale is directly relevant to a single school. Too often, those lessons stay inside large institutions or arrive in language that school leaders cannot readily use.

That is the purpose of Two Swords. William will host a practical free webinar each month for Australian school leaders and technology teams, alongside short briefings for principals, business managers and IT leads. Members of the free community get access to every webinar resource he publishes.

He has also lectured in cyber security and risk management at RMIT University. Teaching is not a side activity here; it is the point.

No one can promise that nothing will ever get through. What a school can build is the ability to see a problem early, contain it calmly and keep teaching while it is resolved.

Preparation, visibility, detection, containment and recovery — in that order, matched to the school's capacity and budget. Known roles, readable reporting and a named adviser to call, rather than a shelf of documents no one has read.

The measure of good security in a school is not how alarming it sounds. It is whether the day continues.