How important is ICFP when you set your budget?

Somehow I seem to have become a reluctant budgeting and financial planning guru. Not only have I, with input from a panel of SRMAs, written the three year budget assumptions published by ISBL for the last two years, but I seem to be called upon to present about financial planning at conferences and to write training on financial planning for others to deliver.

Making Better Guesses

Although being a little bemused by how this has come about, I do enjoy the challenge of trying to bring some order and structure to what is inevitably a very messy process. When we are setting budgets we are making predictions about the future and, inevitably, these predictions will predominantly be incorrect.

Setting a budget is essentially about making a series of guesses about what is going to happen. The best we can do is to work as hard as we can to ensure we make better guesses.

What Do We Want Our School to Become?

Too often budget setting is seen as dry financial exercise to prove that the school is financially viable for the next 12 (or 36) months. It really shouldn’t be this at all. It should be about planning what the school will become. Not, I should clarify, by ensuring there is a ‘costed development plan’, which tends to be completed as a dry and distant exercise to tick a box.

Rather, the budget should be viewed as a way of changing the school so it provides the best possible support and opportunities for pupils.

Think about it this way:

• How have we been spending our money? What is the impact of those spends? If they aren’t having the impact that we want then stop doing them.
• What is really important to the school and what do we think will have greater impact? Let’s spend the money in that way instead.

Schools tend to be conservative organisations which resist change: we continue to do what we have always done. But, the way to really drive improvement, is to be brave enough to abandon what isn’t working.

How Can ICFP help?

Let’s be clear that, although ICFP metrics are often RAG rated the process is not about turning all your metrics green. Green does not mean GOOD it means NORMATIVE. In the same way red does not mean BAD it simply means DIFFERENT from the norm.

In fact, the importance of ICFP when setting your budget is around assessing whether you are the school that you want to be. Are you investing in the areas that you think will have the greatest impact for your pupils. And if you aren’t, then where are you spending more than you need to spend on things that aren’t driving improvements at your school.

Key message: If you are spending money on things that aren’t having an impact then ABANDON those things and spend your money where it will improve the experience and outcomes of your pupils.