Leigh Academies Trust is one of the country’s largest and most-established multi-academy trusts operating across Kent, Medway and South-East London. It contains 33 primary, secondary and special academies and is highly inclusive and successful. The Trust’s mission is to deliver “education for a better world” by ensuring that young people have an excellent start in life regardless of their background or ability.
The Challenge: Decentralised management of critical budgetary variables
The main challenge with the Trust’s previous budgeting system was the “lack of centralisation and consistency, where academies operated in isolation without central oversight”.
Lusine Petrosyan, Deputy Director of Finance and Budget Compliance, explained: “Decentralised management of key variables (Department of Education income, pay scales, pupil numbers etc) limited the Trust’s ability to maintain central oversight and consistency across its academies. The need to manage individual budgets made the process time-consuming for management accountants.”
The Trust, under the leadership of CFO Faye Reizopoulou, identified four specific objectives as it sought to introduce a new budgeting tool:
- Establish full MAT oversight over core financial drivers (income, pupil numbers, pay Scales) to ensure trust-wide consistency.
- Enable the central team to instantly know the financial position of the whole trust for proactive decision-making.
- Dramatically reduce manual effort through centralised data updates, freeing up time for strategic analysis.
The Solution: Trust-wide oversight through IMP Planner
The Trust began working with IMP Software in June 2024, with new budgeting, forecasting and reporting platform IMP Planner scheduled for implementation starting that September.
“The main reason we chose IMP was to establish MAT oversight control over critical budgetary variables – and specifically income, pupil numbers and pay scales,” Faye commented. “The goal was to adopt a ‘do one change, apply everywhere’ approach, meaning that a single update would be applied across all schools, eliminating the time-consuming and error-prone process of updating schools individually.”
Twelve months on, Lusine reflected on the ease of implementation and features of IMP Planner that the Trust particularly values.
She said: “The implementation of IMP was very smooth. This success was due to clear guidance and support from the project team on data submission and overall project requirements. The phase following the initial launch, referred to as the ‘initial success stage’, was fantastic. This included valuable weekly follow-up meetings with our dedicated consultant.
“What we are seeing is the ability to update core financial drivers once at the central level and have it flow through to the entire trust. We are benefiting from the central and comprehensive reporting suite that provides various reports for all academies, including KPIs. Also, the built-in calculators within the system that simplify complex financial planning by automating various income and expenditure calculations.”
Lusine added that the IMP team also provided “strong, structured support throughout the transition and post-implementation phases.”
“During post-implementation, the support was focused on practical application,” she revealed. “The weekly follow-up meetings with our consultant involved demonstrating the system, showing us how to make the best use of it, and providing essential training. This hands-on approach ensured that our team quickly became proficient with the new platform.”
The Impact: Improved accuracy and consistency of data
The Trust has been able to achieve the key objectives set out at the project outset, and IMP Planner has “already delivered significant value to our team and the wider Trust.”
“The most substantial impact has been the consistency of our data inputs and the strength of our MAT consolidation,” said Lusine. “By unifying our budgeting inputs across all schools into a single platform, we have not only improved data consistency, but now all reports are naturally consolidated. This gives us the ability to run reports for an individual school, the entire Trust, or any required subset of schools, which ultimately saves our team significant time.”
“This gained efficiency allows the finance team to shift from administrative data processing to more strategic analysis. We can now dedicate time to modeling scenarios, assessing performance drivers, and providing actionable insights that support high-quality education delivery.
“For Trust leadership, IMP provides essential oversight across all schools. The consolidated, real-time view of financial health enables proactive governance, ensuring resources are allocated effectively and compliance is maintained across the entire organisation.”
Faye concluded: “Our focus for the next 12 months is on advancing from foundational use to complete system integration and strategic application. We aim to adopt the re-forecasting functionality to integrate actual data seamlessly. I would definitely recommend IMP to peers, particularly those operating within the MAT sector.”
