Like any organisation, schools need to understand what income they’ve received and what that income has been spent on.
By conducting an annual benchmarking exercise, a school business manager can not only review how the school budget has been spent, but also investigate those areas where the school has spent significantly more – or even less – than other similarly sized schools.
The DfE’s ‘Schools financial benchmarking’ tool isn’t a perfect resource, since the data it uses is a year old, but schools that tend to base their budget on the previous year’s expenditure may find it useful for improving efficiencies.
The benchmarking data in question is based on CFR codes, which can be problematic as schools often post expenditure to different codes for a variety of reasons. This could be simply due to a misunderstanding of the correct code, or because a cost centre has insufficient funds, necessitating the use of an alternative. Irrespective of that, however, it’s unlikely that this would cause major differences to the data. These two weaknesses in the system shouldn’t deter SBMs from scrutinising the data and acting on their findings.
The benchmarking website allows users to view their own school’s data with supporting graphs and then conduct benchmarking against other schools, either by using the DfE’s default criteria or by setting their own. The website produces raw data with accompanying graphs that can be saved as images, pasted in to your own templates or exported as a CSV file for use in Excel. You might want to prepare your own spreadsheet with conditional formatting in place, so that you can quickly and easily spot notable instances of under- or overspend.
If, for example, you find that you’re spending significantly more on electricity compared to the other schools in your set, you may want to contact some or all of said schools and start asking some pertinent questions. You might want to discover which provider they use, what tariff they’re on, what procedures they have for minimising spend and wastage and so forth. You may well learn that you’re actually with the same provider, or even on the same tariff, and that your next step will probably be to contact your provider and ask why your bills are so high compared with others.
Finding your high spend, and then carrying out appropriate investigations to determine the reasons behind it, will help your school make savings and become more efficient. This process can also be useful when drawing up a business case for changing a service provider or carrying out a staffing restructure. However good your financial management is, conducting an annual exercise like this can only be helpful, and will provide you with robust evidence for future decisions.
Caroline Collins is head of school business strategy and resources at Miles Coverdale Primary School @caroline_261
