To proceed successfully, you need to maintain an active presence within your local and national educational communities, both of which can help provide insights into future changes to things like funding. While it’ll be difficult to accurately predict changes in things like future funding and staff requirements, it’s worthwhile to model scenarios based on hypotheticals, and what you know is likely to occur, such as local planning and internal development. If possible, develop a budgetary forecast that accounts for three-to-five years into the future.

Price increases for goods and services.

Changing funding (sources, revenue, capital income).

Development plans, such as asset management or construction.

For example, you might provide considerations for: The focus in this step will be to determine what the school requires, going forward, based on a range of income and cost scenarios, influenced by historical and current data. If possible, you can also benchmark your school’s performance against similar schools in the area to put past spending into context.

Determine which areas may need extra funding, based on past exam results.Ĭarrying out this analysis will give you better oversight into your new budget and help you to review expenditure.

Discover in which areas budgets have most been weighted to cover in the past.

Identify overspending and underspending concerning performance.

Determine the accuracy of past budgets.

Schools have a wealth of historical data to sift through which enables those responsible for budgets to view how performance fared against budgetary spending, and vice versa. Use the breakdown of what kind of funding your school receives to design an appropriate budget for the future. These types of funding are all subject to change, which means any future budget that relies too heavily on any one strand may suffer.

Revenue funding: is used on things such as heating, stationery, repairs and salaries.

Devolved funding: this type of funding comes with conditions on spending options – for example, devolved capital funding can only be spent on long-term assets and pupil premium money would require evidence that it has been spent to the benefit of target students.

A good example is a dedicated schools grant.

Delegated funding: this is usually a ‘no strings attached’ type of funding.Capital funding: a type of funding used to improve a long-term asset, such as a building or IT network.There are four different streams which generally fund schools: The focus is to always stay within budget while retaining the ability to provide the best service for students, which means good financial planning and management is a must for those involved. The financial responsibilities of a school can be as different as simply handling petty cash to more complex projects such as integrated curriculum and financial planning.

Responsibility for a school’s finances is shared by several key stakeholders what processes are used for successfully planning and implementing a school budget?ĬREDIT: This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared on Schools and Academies

School budget planning calendar mo