Finding smart ways to make cuts
Sir Tim Brighouse writes for Navigate magazine on exploring smarter ways to balance the books
Tim is retired as Chief Adviser for London Schools in 2007. Until 2002, he was Chief Education Officer in Birmingham and Oxfordshire and Deputy Education Officer at the ILEA
It was 1978. I had just arrived as Chief Education Officer of Oxfordshire at the tender age of 38. The Conservative chairman of the education committee informed me we were going to lead the way in making cuts in expenditure as the Thatcher government demanded. ‘Sack 200 teachers, young man’. Coupled with falling school rolls, the outlook was bleak and the euphoria of taking the job had quickly evaporated.
But I had ‘luck’ – that underrated quality of leadership first identified by Napoleon. I hit on a ‘cunning wheeze’. At that time, there was something called the ‘uncapped pool’ which meant that provided you could carry the cost of 25 per cent of a teacher’s salary you could send a teacher on a term or a year secondment for professional development with the balance of the cost being shared between all authorities.
Most were deterred by the 25 per cent. We spotted however that if you replaced the seconded teacher with a low cost NQT plus the 25 per cent, the total cost was less than the senior teacher seconded.
Suddenly the penny dropped. We could have hundreds of secondments for professional development and save money!
Of course that was then. The imminent cuts in budgets – for who can doubt they are coming in the next year or so – won’t be able to be so painlessly achieved.
So what will schools do this time around? I reckon it will be 3–5 per cent and the spin put on it will be ‘efficiency savings’. Who are you kidding? All the energy savings in the world won’t add up in any one school to 3 per cent of the budget. So there will be no avoiding staffing which comprises 80 per cent of the total revenue budget.
So how do you reduce that? It will depend where you are. If rolls are rising – and that is likely to be the case in many places – it will be easier to gradually make teaching groups slightly larger without making people redundant. More difficult if rolls are static or even falling of course. That probably requires school leaders to plan now how their budgets could be on an even keel if there were to be 5 per cent less in it. Would you increase the size of groups? Can you reduce non-contact time? Do you really need the size of leadership team? Are there back-office savings to be made in partnership with other schools or organisations? Can you get grants for other developments from other sources? It is worth doing an exercise so you can take measures over staffing as they arise rather than face a crunch suddenly. To make provisional plans now will reveal staff movements so that longer term decisions can be made when they occur.
There are two things I would protect. The first is professional development. My opening story reminded me that teacher morale in Oxfordshire in the ten difficult years after 1978 was never higher. The intellectual energy and curiosity were fuelled by the secondments and the ‘acting-up’ posts that accompanied the secondments. Professional development is the easily overlooked key ingredient of school improvement. Nor is it only about courses external to the school. It’s teachers having time to observe others: it’s giving them fixed term or temporary leadership roles and rewards. My second priority for protection would be ICT expenditure, which may be able to be coded to capital. But many e-learning platforms open up all sorts of bureaucracy saving time.
How to handle contracting budgets seems to me something on which the National College, SSAT and the headteacher associations will soon be pooling ideas. The best ones will come from heads. In doing so, they will come up with some super ideas especially about professional development.
