VIEWS & OPINION Five top tips for MATs on budget review Comment by WILL JORDAN, Co-Founder of IMP Software
Coordinating a budget across multiple schools comes with some significant practical challenges for multi-academy trust (MAT) finance teams.
As trusts continue their budget- setting period for the 2024-25 academic year, they need to do everything they can to support a more joined up and collaborative approach and reduce the risk of inaccuracies. Budget review is especially critical.
We know there are some areas
that are stickier than others, and generally these tend to be more inconsistently dealt with, so here are our five top tips on that all- important budget review that will make all the difference during what is a particularly challenging time for MATs.
• Compare your 2024-25 draft budget to latest 2023-24 outturn forecast
Comparing your budget against your current year forecast will highlight any areas where income and spend has occurred this year but is not budgeted for in future years, and therefore any differences that should be considered when reviewing your budget. This helps with identifying any revenue streams and costs that may be missing from next year’s numbers. A forecast comparison report, which compares your latest outturn estimate for this year against what you are currently budgeting for next year, is therefore particularly beneficial. Most finance systems will compare the budget that you are working on against the budget that you prepared last year. However, the problem with this is that if something has cropped up ‘in year’, this could therefore be missed from next year’s budget.
• Understand your year-on-year staffing changes and ICFP requirements
Reviewing your full-time equivalent (FTE) staff numbers by different staff roles on a multi-year basis helps to spot any unexpected increases or decreases as a result of your latest staff budgets. Highlighting this allows you to ask questions such as ‘Have we captured all of our vacancies in the budget?’ or ‘Have we forgotten to mark somebody as a leaver?’ This can also be correlated to your curriculum plans e.g. ‘we are merging two classes together next year, so why has our teaching FTE not decreased?’ A multi-year view on staffing levels, based on Integrated Curriculum Financial Planning (ICFP) modelling within your overall budget plan, and ensuring staff increases or decreases are in line with these requirements is needed. Comparing staffing level to previous years has its place, but comparing staffing level to expected activity levels in the future is a more rounded view and ensures optimal decision-making, not just doing what we have always done.
• Review your school resource management KPIs against benchmarking data
Analysing your key school resource management KPIs against national benchmarking data or your trust’s aspirational targets enables a view of how you are performing in key areas compared to schools with similar characteristics. Although this will not make
April 2024
the decisions for you, it highlights differences that exist that can be contextualised or explored for opportunities to do things differently. Recognising that trusts delegate budgets differently, comparing to similar schools within your trust is an effective way to learn how those schools are doing things to see if you could approach activities in a different way. The great thing about internal benchmarking is you can ask other schools how they are achieving x or y and see where the low and high metrics exist within your trust. With external benchmarking, you can raise lots of questions but it is very difficult to get answers due to the anonymity or the data and your inability to understand how those metrics are formed. Consider a system that allows you to set your own trust benchmarks too. These could be informed by national data, but will accommodate trust priorities and take note of trust activities that could distort the school picture. All trusts operate differently and draw the line in a different place as to what is a ‘trust thing’ or a ‘school thing’, but this line will be consistent within your trust and can ensure benchmarking is on a consistent footing.
• Analyse per pupil spend on all expenditure, and pupil adult ratios for all roles
Per pupil metrics can prove to be some of the best comparisons used when comparing one school to others in the trust. Looking at any anomalies against average per pupil spend amounts highlights areas of discussion and potentially presents an opportunity to resource those areas differently. Meanwhile, staff comparisons tend to focus on pupil-facing staff and, whilst this is still important, it is a valuable exercise to understand your pupil adult ratios across your business support functions. This can be compared to other trust schools to ensure you have the optimal number of staff across admin, catering, premises etc. Having a system that automatically calculates per pupil spend metrics for all schools and expenditure lines, and per pupil/adult metrics for all schools and staff roles, across the trust means that you can calculate the average spend per pupil and pupil adult ratio in your schools and highlight those schools that are either over or under this number.
• If in doubt, seek help and speak to others who are going through the process
Whilst not intended as an exhaustive list of all of the tasks you will have to complete during the budget review process, we have focused on those areas that through feedback we know trusts and schools struggle with to ensure a robust and coordinated approach. Help and advice is always available. From our side, we have developed a free-to-all downloadable IMP Budgeting Checklist 2024 - IMP Software (
https://impsoftware.co.uk/imp- budgeting-checklist-blueprint-2024) to support trusts through the budgeting season. The step-by-step interactive budgeting spreadsheet, created with trust finance experts, is designed to help CFOs and their teams who are juggling multiple assumptions and scenarios across multiple schools. This checklist will support streamlined coordination and management of budgets across trusts, help effectively manage budget timeframes for seamless financial planning, and ensure accurate calculation of key grant values based on trust assumptions. It also communicates trust- wide assumptions across various budget areas effortlessly and supports schools in adhering to key budget review tasks.
www.education-today.co.uk 29
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48
