Understanding the pressures on the sector is only the starting point. The real value of benchmarking lies in what comes next: turning data into decisions that strengthen Trust sustainability at both school and central levels.
Building on the insights from our Sector Insights webinar, this second article focuses on how Trusts are applying benchmarking in practical ways through IMP’s reporting tools to drive better outcomes.
MAT-level benchmarking for strategic oversight
For every participating Trust, IMP provides an individual MAT benchmarking report. Certain metrics such as reserves, GAG pooling and levels of centralisation cannot be meaningfully compared at school level and require a Trust-wide view.
These MAT reports give trustees and senior leaders the ability to:
- Spot outliers against comparable Trust peer groups
- Review the structure and cost of central services
- Assess whether reserve or GAG pooling strategies align with peers
- Test whether their degree of centralisation reflects sector norms
Peer groups are constructed to achieve genuine closeness based on Trust structure and composition. Primary-only and secondary-only Trusts benefit from particularly strong comparability, while more complex mixed Trusts are grouped using the safest structural approximations available.
Each report also provides contextual pupil distributions across phases so that leaders understand how closely their Trust aligns with the peer cohorts being used.
School-level benchmarking for operational action
In response to feedback calling for deeper school-level insight, IMP introduced its interactive benchmarking toolkit.
Schools are compared to school peer groups using four key characteristics:
- Phase
- School size
- Level of deprivation
- Region, separating London and the rest of England
These dimensions ensure that comparisons reflect true operating context rather than simplistic national averages.
The toolkit enables Trusts to examine:
- Individual schools against contextual peer groups
- Comparisons across hundreds of income and cost metrics
- DFE revenue grant trends on both absolute and per-pupil bases
- Staffing ratios including pupil-teacher and pupil-support staff balances
- Non-pay expenditure such as energy, IT and educational supplies
Results can be viewed graphically or through tabulated datasets to support both analytical review and board reporting.
This approach surfaces schools with the largest variances rather than those sitting close to averages, directing leadership focus to discussions where the greatest learning or intervention potential lies.
SEND: closing the most urgent benchmarking gap
SEND provision remains one of the most financially complex challenges facing Trusts.
In mainstream schools, benchmarking shows a strong relationship between SEN income and teaching assistant cost per pupil, but the presence of many outliers reveals inconsistent local authority funding and varied resourcing models.
Across the middle fifty percent of Trusts, most are investing more in TA provision than SEN income alone supports, drawing increasingly on core budgets to close the gap. This pressure is most acute in primary schools but remains material in secondary settings as well.
Benchmarking special schools
Special schools face even greater funding variability. IMP now groups special schools based on primary need categories including ASD or broader multi-need bands where specificity is not possible.
Analysis of top-up grant income per pupil highlights enormous variation driven by local authority funding policies rather than pupil need alone. Even schools with very similar SEND profiles can experience materially different funding levels depending on commissioner geography.
Spending profiles demonstrate the consequences of this funding structure. Across special schools:
- Around 60 to 65 percent of income is typically devoted directly to teachers and TAs
- In mainstream schools this figure more commonly sits between 55 and 60 percent
With such a large share of funding tied to frontline staffing, schools have very limited flexibility to absorb increases from national insurance, wage thresholds or contractual obligations. This leaves little capacity for innovation, development or strategic investment, reinforcing the fragility of financial sustainability in specialist settings.
Centralisation and finance team efficiency
Data also reveals important insights around operational models.
Only 22 percent of Trusts are fully centralised across all six core services. However, 55 percent centralise four out of six functions, indicating that partial centralisation is now the sector norm.
Finance teams show the strongest efficiency gains from full centralisation:
- Fully centralised teams cost approximately 5 percent less per staff member on average
- They support nearly 800 pupils per finance FTE, compared with just over 700 in decentralised models
Trust size compounds these effects. Small decentralised Trusts spend close to £120 per pupil on finance teams, similar to medium-sized organisations. However, large decentralised Trusts rise to around £140 per pupil, while fully centralised large Trusts reduce this figure to £85 to £90 per pupil.
These differences offer powerful evidence for leaders evaluating operating model design and central service investment.
Pooling strategies across Trusts
Pooling remains a complex and often misunderstood practice.
Current data shows:
- 55 percent of Trusts pool reserves
- Only 21 percent pool GAG funding
These figures reflect the gap between aspiration and execution. Many Trusts express intent to explore pooling, but stakeholder concerns, governance perspectives and practical barriers delay implementation. Actual adoption remains significantly lower than rhetoric might suggest.
Turning insight into action
Benchmarking delivers its value when it drives confident leadership dialogue rather than static reporting.
Across IMP Trusts, teams are using these insights to:
- Review SEND staffing models against funding realities
- Evaluate the cost effectiveness of finance and operational teams
- Identify schools performing significantly above or below peer benchmarks
- Test assumptions behind staffing restructures before execution
- Model the impact of centralisation and pooling changes
Crucially, these conversations are grounded in a single live data platform rather than spreadsheets detached from operational reality.
Looking ahead
The depth and quality of forward-looking benchmarking data now available represents one of the most important assets available to Trust finance and leadership teams.
With the largest live financial dataset in the MAT sector, IMP is committed to continuing development of deeper insights and applying emerging AI tools to support faster identification of patterns and solutions across schools and Trusts.
This work exists to serve a simple goal: to help Trust leaders move from understanding financial pressure to actively shaping financial resilience.
Talk to us about what the benchmarking data means for your Trust.
