Greenshaw Learning Trust is a MAT comprising 37 primary and secondary schools. Its schools are located in South London, Surrey, Berkshire, Gloucestershire, Bristol and Plymouth. The Trust provides an effective structure to ensure schools achieve real benefits from school-to-school collaboration and receive the support they need. Its culture of trust and openness fosters mutual support and continual improvement.
The Challenge: No MAT-level oversight, and inconsistency in approaches by school
Greenshaw Learning Trust has a team of 11 finance business partners who look after their 37 schools. The role and responsibilities of these partners, as a driver in the Trust’s overall approach to budgeting, forecasting and reporting, are:
- Operating as a key link between schools and the Trust/central team, promoting collaborative working.
- Providing strategic financial support and advice to empower schools when making financial decisions, with headteachers ultimately responsible.
- Working with schools to prepare and set budgets.
- Facilitating effective budget management by producing frequent financial reports, including monthly management accounts, annual budgets and forecasting outturns.
- Ensuring compliance with financial policies and procedures.
- Delivering consistency in budget assumptions and supporting with effective resource allocation.
The Trust was using another budgeting platform that did not provide a MAT-level picture and was not being adopted consistently in the schools.
Simon Hunter, Senior Finance Business Partner, explained: “The main issue we had as a trust was that our previous system was very individualised, and we had business partners using it in different ways for different schools, so it was really challenging to provide that consistency in service to schools. Also then, at Trust level, it became impossible to pull all that information together. It was a strategic decision to seek change.”
The Solution: Supporting the role of finance business partners through IMP Planner
In November 2023, Greenshaw Learning Trust adopted IMP Planner. Simon, on his part, joined the Trust in February 2024 at a time when IMP was being implemented. This was a welcome development as he also used Planner in his previous MAT, where he worked as a school business manager. describing that experience as a “great introduction to how it works.”
“From day one at Greenshaw, the IMP implementation team did an incredible job bringing me up to speed, and my role since has been to take the lead on how we use Planner and maximise its benefits,” Simon said. “It is a great system. With IMP, the beauty as a Senior Finance Business Partner is I have got access to all the schools so I can pull off all the information at a drop of a hat with the consolidated reports. The biggest bonus we find with IMP is we have got a view of everything. When it comes to things like the BFR and the template that is produced, collating that information is so easy. Previously it was just a nightmare. That is the strategic part of IMP, and why we went with them.”
At IMP Customer Connect 2025, Simon shared how the role of the finance business partner is embedded across the Trust, offering practical insights from strengthening school engagement to enabling informed decision-making.
Key takeaways included:
- Building strong relationships between headteachers and finance business partners is key – being present, and learning what matters to each school makes finance partnering more meaningful and effective.
- The finance business partner role does not need to be formally defined to have impact – Simon’s own influence has grown organically through support, challenge and trust.
- Splitting strategic and transactional responsibilities helps to streamline audits, enhance budget conversations, and improve reporting.
“We keep finance business partners focused on two things across all our schools: planning and setting budgets (making sure that schools are financially resilient), and monitoring budgets (letting headteachers know what they have got left to spend),” Simon commented. “Now we are taking another step further forward with IMP in the way it forecasts to look at the medium-term plan and look at three years down the line.
“There are big challenges in a number of our schools where pupil numbers are falling, so in primary schools we can see that predicted roll in year three is significantly lower than where we are now. So, what are we doing to mitigate that challenge? Because we have got that data really easily accessible within IMP we can start then pulling together that information and work with headteachers to create a plan moving forward.”
Simon revealed that IMP directly informs the agenda for monthly meetings with headteachers, helping to “drive really good conversations”: “We start off those conversations with our schools management account report from IMP Planner to give the current forecasted position and what the end of the year is looking like at that point. If we are forecasting a deficit, for example, it is about making the headteacher aware of this, and looking at factors which can mitigate that through a savings plan. Another part of the meeting is headteachers updating finance business partners on what they are planning in schools. So, if they are looking at sixth forms, you start talking about the curriculum model and how they are developing that, and work with them to build this into staffing requirements and deployments.
“Headteachers at our Trust have a responsibility to have a balanced budget at the end of the year. It is a two-way conversation to make sure they are sharing as much information as we are giving them, and that always goes back into IMP.”
The Impact: Consolidated oversight and effective Trust-wide scenario planning
For Simon, the biggest impact of IMP Planner is the “MAT-level overview: the consolidated part of IMP that is just so, so useful.” He said:
“When we look at monitoring the finance business partner is really key to that month-end process. We have got the transactional side doing their processing, the actuals come in, and then the finance business partners push through that month-end. So we do that at a school level, and make sure the narrative and context of ‘why’ things are like that is there. That narrative goes into the school management accounts and then my role is in consolidating all the schools. We are then able to provide an overview document for our directors, to then take to headteachers and continue the conversation.
“It has been a great learning curve for me, personally, because as a Trust we have grown and I have gone through the process of adding schools to IMP. The flexibility that Planner has around imports and exports, and being able to add those things at a bulk level, is fantastic and also then extracting that data at a consolidated bulk level has been so key. And we are all using the same data from the one data point, IMP, which has been an incredible tool for us as a trust. It has helped us to model some hefty changes. When the schools budget support grant or National Insurance contributions grant comes in, we can create a scenario in IMP and see what the impact is going to be. The last time the latter came though, by the afternoon of the announcement, we had a picture of how that is going to impact all of our schools. That is an amazing part of the tool that IMP Planner brings.”
Simon continued: “The support from the people I have worked with at IMP is fantastic. Even when it comes to the online helpdesk, colleagues are always so friendly and polite and will go out of their way to try to get things done. Their mantra is there are no stupid questions in finance, and IMP have a done a wonderful job teaching the system to us: their knowledge and ability, as well as the patience they have shown.”
Moving forward, Simon plans to continue the push on “driving through consistency to make sure everybody is doing the same thing” in IMP. “That way, we will be able to extract more and more really relevant data from the system,” he added.
Case study developed: August 2025
