As you prepare budgets across your Trust, tough decisions are inevitable. Rising costs and tight financial headroom mean you need to be sure every resource is allocated wisely – and that you fully understand the compromises being made.
In this session, we’ll show you how Trust-wide benchmarking can help you spot where budgets are out of line, guide deliberate choices on resource allocation, and have more informed conversations with school leaders during the review stage.
We’ll cover:
The current funding landscape for schools – and the pressures it creates during budget planning
- How benchmarking helps identify outliers, highlight inconsistencies, and support deliberate, data-driven decisions
- Why comparing schools by type (e.g. primary vs secondary) and context (e.g. pupil demographics, size, location) leads to better, fairer insights
- Key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor, including pupil-teacher ratios, per-pupil income and expenditure, and staff costs as a percentage of revenue
- How to use our free Excel toolkit to benchmark budgets and performance – and use the findings to challenge assumptions and support better decision-making
