Recommendation 17

We asked the Department whether it was aware of the measures schools were taking in response to financial pressures and if they were a cause for concern. The Department told us it had been encouraged that, during the period when school budgets were falling per pupil in real terms, expenditure per pupil on staffing had stayed relatively flat, whereas expenditure per pupil on non-staff areas, such as energy costs, had gone down more significantly. It said that this was what it wanted to see, and that much of the work it had done through the school resource management programme had been about trying to help schools to save money on things like energy bills, procurement and other supplies, in order to release funds to spend in other areas. It told us that it had tried to use benchmarking 32 HC Committee of Public Accounts, Ofsted’s inspection of schools, Sixtieth Report of Session 2017–19, September 2018 33 C&AG’s Report, paras 1.31–1.32, 1.34 34 Qq 93, 120 35 FSE0003 National Education Union submission, page 7 36 FSE0006 National Association of Head Teachers submission, pages 4 37 FSE0002 Mr Robin M Bevan, Headteacher, Southend High School for Boys submission, page 2 12 Financial sustainability of schools in England tools to encourage schools to think about how they could, overall, move expenditure from non-staff to staff because it knew that good-quality teachers were the thing that made the biggest difference to children’s outcomes.38 The ESFA highlighted that it deployed school resource management advisers to help individual schools find efficiencies.39