Financial Management

Nine Ways To Set An Effective School Budget

How can school and academy leaders set a realistic budget that will help – not hinder – the delivery of great education? Jackie Keegan shares her top tips.
Teacher reading documents and planning a budget at her classroom desk.

Schools are under a tremendous amount of pressure to deliver high educational outcomes with budgets that are decreasing in real terms, and the latest figures suggest around 9% of schools are now in deficit. Careful planning is needed to craft a budget that delivers a worthy education for every child while keeping finances out of the red – and these tips can make for a great place to start.

1) Don’t just use last year’s budget

Writing budgets gets more challenging every year. Gone are the days of replicating last year’s budget lines and simply adjusting them for inflation! Taking that approach now is a surefire way to make more work for yourself in the long run. Take the time to analyse the outcomes from the year-end accounts of the previous year, looking at where you over (or under) spent on different budget lines and why. Was your initial figure unrealistic, or were there mitigating circumstances?

In our experience, the three areas where budget expectations often don’t align with actual spending are energy, staffing and IT.

Energy costs are tricky to forecast as they are weather-dependent and reliant on securing a good value tariff. Many schools procure through the local authority so those tariffs are already set, but academies can shop around for a better deal.

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