Measures to save money don’t have to be massively radical. Small efficiencies can yield great gains, says Sam Ellis.

Cognitive behaviour

I am not sure I should admit to this but I used to teach physics.

When I was involved in that dark art, efficiency was a frequent item on the agenda. I would sometimes illustrate it with a pulley system originally designed to lift a car engine. Getting a small year 7 pupil to use it to lift a bulky year 11 student perched on the attached seat added to the theatre of it, particularly with the pulley hooked to a very high ceiling.

Although my tiny assistant could easily lift the year 11 volunteer to a height where he would confess to anything, the unexpected happened when we worked out the energy involved. A simple sum informed by a force meter, a metre rule and a set of bathroom scales showed that, while the year 7 pupil did not supply much force, he or she put in far more energy than was transferred to the year 11 passenger.

So the pulley system was not very efficient. The numbers improved a little with a few squirts of WD40 but we still never got anywhere near 100 per cent efficiency.

Financial efficiency in schools and colleges is a key issue. Becoming more efficient in, say, the procurement of supplies and services such as insurance and cleaning, could potentially save four figure sums to invest in teaching and learning.

As an example, let’s say that the average teacher cost is £50,000 and income per student is £5,000 in revenue funding.

If you can cut the amount spent on non-staff lines from 41 per cent to 38 per cent of the revenue budget, it would free up enough money to employ more teaching staff – enough, in fact, to change the studentteacher ratio from 17:1 to 16:1. In curriculum terms, if the teacher contact ratio is 0.78, that is the difference between an average class size of about 22 as opposed to one of about 20.5.

A lower average class size does not necessarily mean smaller classes, and team teaching and intervention strategies also reduce the statistic. However, the lower value does mean that there is increased management flexibility in staff deployment even if the size of main teaching groups does not change. Small efficiencies in non-staff budgets can be vital.

The concept applies across the staff lines as well as non-staff lines. Any senior leader knows that in a school or college the most important things are not the 'things' but the people. The key question is: "Am I leading, managing and deploying staff as efficiently as I can, given the finite resource available?"

There is no simple answer here. Sometimes a wholesale change is required to improve efficiency – but not always.

The quote attributed to Gaius Petronius in AD 64 says it all: "We trained hard...but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganised. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganising; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralisation."

I cannot vouch for the provenance of the quote but I like the sentiment. Efficiency is about changing what you do. That is not always throwing out the baby and the bathwater. It is sometimes just a matter of oiling the appropriate cogs.

There are several sources of practical support for oiling the cogs, including training courses, consultancy and downloadable materials available through the ASCL website at www.ascl.org.uk/training

The Department for Education website, www.education.gov.uk/efficiency, has five sections with links to various tools and sources of support down the right-hand side of each page. It also provides case studies of what individual schools have done to improve their efficiency.

There is also a range of information and tools specifically about procurement at www.education.gov.uk/procurement These range from an e-learning system on procurement to an easy to use tool to help locate the best public service contracts. There are also links to the main public sector buying organisations and a range of framework agreements that schools can access.

If any ASCL members have come across sources of support they have found useful, do pass them on to me. In the case of the DfE website, feedback is welcome as I will pass on suggestions directly to them with the hope of improving the information available.

I think we will need as much oil as we can find in the coming few years to keep the system operating with a degree of efficiency.

• Sam Ellis is ASCL's funding specialist

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