Frontline: School business manager

“I work in an average-sized, urban secondary school in an area of extreme poverty – our ward is in the bottom five per cent, in terms of deprivation, across the whole country.

Mine is a senior operational role dealing with everything from finance to legal compliance. Mainly, it’s ensuring that the financial, legal and health and safety aspects of the school’s work are properly run.  I’ve been in this job five years and in the sector eight years. My previous role was similar to this one; before that I worked as a company secretary in the third sector.

Over the last ten years schools funding has increased enormously, but changing government priorities still make it hard to plan ahead. Our local authority is one of the best funded in the country – because we have high levels of deprivation – but our school budget only balances because of  government project money, the Standards Funds, coming into schools.

These funds are linked to  politically set priorities – they  throw extra money at us for improving attainment among certain groups, for example. They allow us to balance our budget and keep operating so when you come up to a change of government and the comprehensive spending review, we start to think what the government’s priorities might be in the next 12,18, 36 months, and wonder if we’ll be able to balance our budget.

That in turn leads to schools keeping back excess balances from their budgets to build a contingency fund. Generally, schools are only allowed to hold a surplus of less than five per cent of their annual budget [eight per cent for primary schools] – above this, if the money isn’t allocated to a specific project then the local authority can take it back. But schools are past masters of hovering just below the cap: look across well funded authorities and you will see lots of schools sitting on 4.98 per cent of their budget.

There is an issue around fairer distribution of schools money – although we’re well funded one of our neighbouring councils is one of the worst-funded in the country. School leaders there would dream of being able to hold even 2.5 per cent of their budget back, and yet they're trying to educate kids in the same country, on the same syllabus, to compete in the same labour market. The distribution system is outdated, and could be much more closely tied to indexes of multiple deprivation to make it more equitable.

There’s also an issue about getting head teachers and governors to plan adequately, and link the educational priorities with the school budget. I think there’s work that central government could do here. Head teachers have access to support for curriculum planning, and if they have a business manager they have some of that [financial planning] expertise in house, but actually because the business manager is subordinate to the head teacher it’s very difficult to say: ‘Your planning’s not adequate, boss’. Having a ‘critical friend’ from outside looking for a vigorous link between budget and strategic priorities would help schools make more effective use of public funds.

One change which has made my job easier is the government-led school financial benchmarking site, which allows schools to compare their budgets. Not only did the government dip its toe in the water and allow us to look at ‘comparable schools’, but when schools said we wanted to know which individual school’s data we were looking at, the department amended the system. Now I can compare our spend with a school down the road and ask: ‘Why are their results looking like that compared to ours? What are they spending on premises? What are they spending on teaching assistants?’

More could also be done to support IT management in schools – I’m not sure if it should be centralised but I don't think we have a professional cohort of IT managers yet. Often, a school’s approach to IT is being decided by people who were at university 20 years ago: we're starting to design 21st century learning when we haven’t experienced it ourselves.

There was some good work around that in the Building Schools for the Future programme. Ours was one of the rebuild projects that got cancelled, so we had done a lot around ICT, re-imagining what our school’s provision could look like and how the premises could support that. But now our premises provision is no longer about being inspirational, it’s about being warm, safe and dry, which isn't exactly preparing an innovative curriculum and shaping premises and ICT provision around that.

There wasn’t a lot of anger about the cancellation in our school, because head and governors had decided that the programme was vulnerable and hadn't done that much work with the wider staff team.

In education, change is probably par for the course when politicians change targets, according to their priorities, something which has happened a lot in the past. I would ask new ministers to set priorities and stick to them. Give schools a commitment: ‘These are our three year priorities, these are spending plans, we will not change or add anything’. We’ll happily respond to what our political masters want, but give us time to do it.”