Keystone’s Stephen Mitchell believes that SBLs have a crucial role to play in creating the ‘beautiful music’ of effective school improvement
An orchestra is not just the result of people who are talented at playing instruments. They’re all individually needed but the whole orchestra of musicians is required to finely hone the sound into a great acoustic spectacle. The same is true for schools. Great teachers can inspire a young mind to be a rocket scientist, to strive for advances in medicine, to win gold medals at championships, or to advance the boundaries of art, but they also need a whole team of people behind them, refining the way the school works and pushing forward for school improvement at every turn.
The role of the school business professional is not just to balance the books; it is intrinsic to excellent school improvement. Somewhere in the country, in one of our schools, is a future prime minister. We owe it to them to do everything we can to give our children the best education they can possibly receive.
An SBL does need to have a good grasp on the numbers – it’s a core part of their job – but some research in 2016 by PricewaterhouseCoopers showed that finance teams spend more than three-quarters of their time analysing what had been spent, and less than 25% of their time looking forward, contributing to where the organisation is going. If we’re going to have the impact on school improvement that we need to, we need to flip those numbers on their head. We are spending taxpayers’ money so, of course, we need to know what we have spent it on, what worked, what didn’t, etc, but, we also need to be absolutely involved in getting alongside our teaching colleagues, and planning for the future, ensuring that we’re using the resources we have for the best possible outcomes of children.
The school business profession has come a long way in recent years. The work of the ISBL in developing professional standards has been a great stepping stone in developing the language around how we engage with the educational focus of our schools. The SBLs who have the biggest impact are those that recognise their role is to support, to advise, and to bring their own unique perspective to the conversation of how we improve a school.
We’re uniquely placed to bring some really valuable insights to that table. Sure, we are not likely to be in a position where we can see that a particular child is struggling with the nuances of a particular topic, and advise what intervention to put in place, but we are most definitely a part of the decision and the vehicle that enables that to happen.
Integrated curriculum financial planning (ICFP) has been gaining traction for several years now and is a particularly favoured acronym of our friends at the ESFA at the moment. Lambasted alongside the early iterations of the School Resource Management Advisers programme as a process for cutting costs in schools, it has matured over time and is now being sensibly seen not as a penny-pinching accountant’s tool, but as a vital resource and methodology for asking questions about the efficacy of where our finite resources are being spent, and why we do what we do.
Using ICFP correctly, SBLs can work with colleagues to determine the curriculum that the school wants to deliver and marry this up with the funds that they have. Knowing what your staffing profile looks like, what the teaching load is, where extra money needs to be deployed and where, perhaps, by doing something different, we can get the same or better result for less cost is where SBLs can work wonders.
Key metrics such as the contact ratio (how much time teachers spend in a classroom delivering lessons) through to the pupil-to-adult/teacher ratios – combined with the average salary cost, the average cost per lesson, and the percentage spend on different budget areas, and where this sit compared to benchmark averages – do not in themselves give you the answers, but they do give you the questions. Questions as to why you move away from the average, and to identify whether your individual context justifies that.
There’s a lot of talk about ‘averages’ which is very frustrating. It’s easy to get fixated on benchmarking, comparing ourselves to the school down the road, or the regional or national average. I don’t know about you, but, I don’t want to be involved in an average school. I want to be involved in an incredible school, one that is making the educational experience magical, and giving children the best step up in life. I want to be an outlier – for the right reasons – and, it’s the data, and the understanding of the school, that gives that insight.
SBLs should be part of the senior leadership team in a school. Your voice is valid and your place at the table is justified. However, we need to ensure that we don’t just focus on the spreadsheets, the health and safety compliance reporting, the catering figures, or the latest subject access request. We need to ensure that our voice is heard in the discussion about how can we make our schools better in the classroom too.
How can we help shape the vision of our pedagogically-focused colleagues, and bring that to life? The data that you bring to the conversation, and the insights into what is possible (and what isn’t) will help to shape outcomes for children.
It will help the collective of talented ‘musicians’ become an incredible orchestra.
About Keystone
Keystone provides schools and trusts across the country with a wide range of operational services; from HR and estates to projectd that help trusts achieve their growth strategy, Keystone provides expertise and works collaboratively with schools and trusts to ensure best practice is shared.
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