Get ready for your SRMSAC! Clare Skinner discusses her approach to completing the School Resource Management Self-Assessment Checklist, emphasising the importance of trustee involvement
Working in an academy, I enter the Spring Term 2025 with a weight lifted from my shoulders, having said goodbye to year end audit for 23-24, submitted capital improvement fund grants and completed the academies accounts return.
Feeling well rested after the festive break, I start to think about budget forecasting and summer works but then I remember the catchily titled ‘School Resource Management Self-Assessment Checklist’ (SRMSAC), that is due for submission in March.
The SRMSAC is a tool that trusts (open as of the 31st of December 2024) must use to review whether they are maximising the effective use of their resources, therefore providing an opportunity to make improvements where appropriate. If you are sitting in a maintained school, you will need to complete the equally catchily titled ‘Schools Financial Value Standard’ (SFVS), which is a similar type of return tailored to the maintained sector and whilst I focus on the SRMSAC here, the same advice applies to the SFVS.
A Great Starting Point
Because I am a bit of an SBP geek, and I love my role, I quite like having to complete the SRMSAC at this time of year; I am halfway through my financial cycle, and it is a good starting point to think about my next year budget and whether I can do things better or just differently. I also love it as I can use it as a chance to get robust trustee engagement in the financial management side of the trust operation.
Now of course, I report to the board as required and the chair receives management accounts monthly as does the accounting officer; I report on risks and opportunities alongside the numbers, but the SRMSAC allows me to do a bit more than just give information, it means that I can consider school finances from a trustee’s point of view and check their understanding of school finances as well.
It would be very easy for me to complete the checklist by answering yes or no to all the questions, hand it over to my headteacher as accounting officer for review and get the board to approve it before submission but I must question – where the value is in that?
Instead, when completing the SRMSAC, I invite a trustee into school (or onto Teams!) to do it with me. The checklist includes the six areas of financial management and governance, strategy, budgets, staffing, value for money and protecting the public purse – so trustee input into this process is vital.
Trustees hold accountability for these matters as per the Academy Trust Handbook and, therefore they should be able to answer the questions within the SRMSAC.
Identifying Skill Gaps
If they can’t, then it provides a fantastic tool to identify skill gaps and to address them, leading to a more knowledgeable and engaged board for your trust.
Furthermore, it means that as the SBP, you can be confident that your board understands all of the information that you are giving them at each meeting, that they understand why you have highlighted certain risks as a result of the numbers in the financial reports and they can support you with making decisions about delivering projects based around the opportunities that your finances may present you during the year.
Working Together
The other benefit of trustee involvement in the process is relationship building. Working through the 46 questions will take a couple of hours but will be worth every minute: the SBP whilst working through the answers, evidencing current practice and responding to challenges raised by the trustee during that session will be able to demonstrate where things work well and where they need support to make things work better.
This will mean that the trustee will really get to understand and appreciate the complexities of managing the trust’s finance and be in a stronger position to be able to support the SBP at in relation to decision making at trust level as and when needed. They will also be able to support the SBP in the delivery of their role and workload pressure points due to an improved understanding of what we must do daily.
Although it would be very easy to simply answer yes or no to the SRMSAC questions, get it signed off and submit it, our roles demand that we must avoid a road to complacency.
Our job function is to deliver best value, and I think that the SRMSAC can help us not only deliver this by really evidencing our answers but also through the engagement with and development of trustees and robust consideration of how we could make improvements in the actions that the SRMSAC requires.
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