Ensure that you have a good working knowledge of how to use a spreadsheet – NAHT run both introductory and intermediate courses for school leaders – and identify any financial modelling experience in the staff or governing body.
Ensure that you have a good working knowledge of how to use a spreadsheet – NAHT run both introductory and intermediate courses for school leaders – and identify any financial modelling experience in the staff or governing body.
Ensure that it is not just the headteacher that understands the budget in detail – eg how money comes in and goes out, how the LMS works, how much you get per child and per different category of child – but also the governors, the deputy and the bursar, for schools that have them.
Establish the school’s aims and philosophy for three years and then evaluate the impact of all cost centres in terms of meeting these.
Evaluate the cost centres and their effectiveness where there is no obvious direct link to teaching and learning.
Understand the impact of the external context – eg falling rolls – on your schools’ finances and its aims over the next three years.
Set up a team with representatives across the school and governing body to identify and analyse the potential that exists for income generation.
Consider what financial resources can be released as a result of the creative use of IT.
Review the percentage of your expenditure that has gone into staffing salary costs for the past three years and project this at a stable or reduced percentage for the next three years.
Review the experience profile of your teaching staff in order to anticipate incremental drift and performance threshold increases in addition to pay rises. Create a shadow staffing budget to understand and monitor the implications of this.
For primaries, project your school roll for three years and map your staffing resources against this. For secondaries, map your school curriculum planning document to the shadow staffing budget in order to inform curriculum development.