Collaborate and thrive?

With tougher times ahead for funding school leaders gathered for the first national conference dedicated to the efficient use of resources. Nick Bannister went along.

How did we get to be here?”  It was a rhetorical question emblazoned across a conference projection screen, but one that many of those gathered to discuss school resources must have asked themselves at some stage in the past few months.

After a decade of generous real-term growth in education  budgets England’s schools are now contemplating a future of much-reduced spending. According to last autumn’s pre-budget report, school funding will grow in real terms by just 0.7 per cent in the next financial year. That’s generous compared to the funding freezes and cuts predicted in many other sectors, but it’s quite a contrast to the heady days of school funding in the noughties.

It was against this backdrop of contrasting fortunes and some uncertainty that over 100 headteachers, school business managers, governors, local authority officials and national agency representatives gathered in Birmingham for a National College conference looking at the challenge of using existing resources better. The aim of the event was to create a forum for schools taking innovative approaches to resource management to share their approaches with others – and for heads, business managers, governors, local authority officials, professional associations and government to get their collective heads together to identify and discuss the key issues – and explore approaches.

Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) School Resources Director Dugald Sandeman – the man who oversees the resourcing of England’s 23,000 schools – took centre stage.

“The challenge is about improving efficiency while at the same time continuing to improve school standards and raising levels of achievement by working together,” he told delegates.

He pointed out that per pupil expenditure – made up of school running costs and pupil focused spending – varied considerably between schools, with some schools spending a significantly higher proportion of those sums on managing the school estate.

“One of the decisions schools must make is to look at these expenditure patterns and ask why they are like that.”

He said that planning decisions made in 2010 would have big implications in 2011 when tougher spending levels would be a reality. It was time for schools to start planning for that situation now, he said.

Collaboration was key to the efficient use of resources, he said, stressing that there was the need for a cultural change so that schools embraced a more collaborative approach to the issue of resourcing.

Many of the schools at the event were already some way down that path, with school business managers playing a pivotal role. Some of the 240 plus schools involved in the National College’s school business director demonstration projects, set up to trial a strategic level bursar post which works across a group of schools, were showcasing their collaborative working in a conference ‘marketplace’ (see case study).

Mick Brookes, General Secretary of the NAHT, agreed that collaboration was a sensible way for schools to achieve better value. “Clustering is tough”, he said. “One of the barriers is that heads are so busy. It’s often easier to renew an ineffective contract than to go out looking for better alternatives. But as budgets get tighter, more and more are going to have to look at this.”

But he warned against an efficiency drive being used as a way of making schools federate. “Clustering is good practice, particularly for small schools,”  he said. “But it has to happen in an environment of trust.”

“Imposed federations will be met with some resistance by my members,” he said.

Shared funding was vital if schools were to get the most value out of clustering, said Sarah Monk, business strategy director at Darlington Education Village, a 3-19 federation which brought together three local schools on one purpose-built site when it opened in 2006.

But she said regulations made it hard for schools to easily pool their resources so that they could increase their bargaining power with service providers. “There should be legislation to allow schools to pool budgets,” she said. “We pool budgets at the moment to give us more buying power but we have to desegregate them at the end of each financial year to comply with regulations.”

Dugald Sandeman agreed that there needed to be a serious look at how financial disincentives to collaboration were removed.

“The white paper signified I think an end of an era of autonomous schools and that from now on schools would be expected to work together,” he said.

“The tension is that our current accountability system operates on a single school basis… we need to look at how we move some of the financial disincentives out of the way in order to let more collaboration and federation take place.”

The issues will continue to be discussed and explored over the coming months as the theme of the effective use of resources is picked up at National College events around the country.