With the forthcoming pay freeze and funding constraints, there are challenging times ahead for school budgets. Ministers must base their decisions on more than just a diet of anecdotal evidence, says Sam Ellis.

Shedding pounds

The range of New Year diets is astounding: Atkins, Low GI, Cabbage Soup, Scotch Bonnet Chilli and so on.

Frequently along with each diet comes the story that morphs into a universal truth. “Eric and Tracey have eaten stewed sprouts and flageolet beans for two months and lost two stones each” ...and several close friends, I imagine, if such tales were true.

Whatever the illustration, there is a willingness to generalise from anecdote to a universal law. Sadly this tendency is not restricted to diet analysis. The school experience of any individual turns easily into a general truth. For example: “We had to sit and read in silence for one hour every day and it didn’t do me any harm.”

I wonder what anecdotes based on ministers’ school experiences are traded in Westminster? And I worry if these are generalised into universal laws with regard to the way schools can be managed.

Simple truth

Underneath all the diet advice is a fairly simple truth. If you want to lose weight you need to eat less and do more. It’s the first law of thermodynamics really. It just happens to be a lot less interesting than hearing about some celebrity losing several stones on a diet of prunes and champagne.

With schools, there are essentially two things to worry about: firstly, there is the environment, by which I mean the sum of all the material resources provided by the funding, the buildings, the external demands, policies and frameworks. Secondly, there is the body of employees who operate within that environment to produce student learning and achievement.

It is easy to spend time generalising anecdotes, playing with so-called principles and introducing change which essentially only modifies the environment, forgetting that the most important elements in a school are not the ‘things’. You can plan and resource the perfect vegetable garden but unless you have a good person or set of people working as an effective team managing it, you rapidly end up with a mess.

One of the problems in managing the people who actually produce the golden eggs in a school is that you need to pay them. Contrary to popular belief, such individuals do not live in store cupboards and are not significantly motivated by the thought of long holidays and at-cost photocopying.

Staff remuneration is a key issue in schools. The government has imposed a pay freeze and it also appears that the on-costs (National Insurance and so forth) for staff have been fixed for the coming two years. Given that the period of ‘protecting school budgets in terms of flat cash per pupil’ covers two years more than the pay freeze there are some interesting times in prospect.

As far as the staff cost in a school is concerned, I would want to know exactly where I am starting from and where I am going before doing anything. I don’t envisage any significant margin for error in the near future.

Incremental drift

There are various challenging elements. Incremental drift, the cost and cost-effectiveness of management structures, the proportions spent on different categories of staff, the cost of cover for staff absence and the impact of resignations, retirements and appointments are just some of them. I think it is possible to model significant aspects of these. As a start I have drawn up a spreadsheet which is available as a download from the ASCL website. This sheet models the incremental drift and the management structure in a secondary school.

I have put the sheet on the website for two purposes. First, it is a response for requests from members. Second, as a data collection tool: I can use the information (anonymously) to inform funding discussions behind the scenes at Westminster.

Some members have kindly supplied me with data on contact ratio and average class size which has already proved useful. All the data collection sheets and downloadable ‘freebies’ are available on the ASCL web site.

If you have not already completed any earlier sheets I would still welcome data returns. There is no end date for sending me information I may be able to use on your behalf in attempts to ease the impact of the crash funding diet heading in the school direction.

• Sam Ellis is ASCL’s funding specialist
  

Further reading…

To download the finance model spreadsheet go to www.ascl.org.uk/home/funding_data_collection

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