Making Strategic Finance a Team Pursuit

How can you refine financial and curriculum metrics to support informed strategic decision making across the wider management team?

The Spending Review in October 2021 delivered the financial settlement for the next three funding years (2022 – 2025) and included spending on the core schools budget for 5-16 year-olds, programme funding for 16-19 and recovery funding . Recovery funding takes different forms, comes with different levels of prescription and has different life spans. However, the need for sustainable strategic financial planning remains constant.

School finance software necessarily provides information in fine detail. This level of detail may not be needed for general strategic discussion and decision making across a wider team that includes those who are not financial experts. Strategic discussion involving plans for addressing lost periods of learning must be aligned with available resource.

The aim of this course is to show how financial information can be streamlined and used in strategic financial planning and which includes non-financial specialists, governors, and trustees.

We will use a summary of financial and staffing data from the current year, consider the expected financial outturn position and contextualise in terms of three finance and two curriculum parameters. Whichever one of the three possible outcomes that apply - deficit, balance or surplus - will be used in a ‘What if’ context to determine the extent to which key variables can be changed to affect the financial outcomes in future years.

Speaker

Learning outcomes

Participants will

understand what funding streams are available and their conditions of grant
consider input data, checks for sense and benchmarking
understand curriculum parameters: teacher contact ratio and average class size
use their own data to pull together their learning into a ‘What if?’ analysis

There will also be the opportunity to ask questions and share ideas with other attendees.

Provisional programme

ASCL Professional Development reserves the right to amend the programme should circumstances dictate.

9.45am			Registration

10.00am			Welcome and introductions

10.15am			Funding streams and conditions of grant

11.15am			Refreshment break

11.30am			Input data, checks for sense and benchmarking

12.15pm			Curriculum parameters and levers

12.45pm			Lunch

1.30pm			Curriculum parameters and levers (continued)

2.00pm			'What if' analysis and using your own data

3.00pm			Closing remarks

Suitable for

The principles of this course apply to all types of schools across all age-ranges, however at this particular event we will focus on secondary schools.

The course is relevant for any members of the leadership team with financial management responsibility.