Secondary schools need smaller leadership teams as they seek to cope with the financial squeeze, the national schools commissioner has warned.

Schools have to make savings of £3 billion by 2019-20, according to the National Audit Office, while thousands are set to see their funding fall under the proposed national funding formula.

Sir David Carter told headteachers in Yorkshire this month that the system had “gone beyond the point” where schools could cope by “just making cuts to every budget line we have”.

Calling for schools to “fundamentally reconceptualise” how they use resources, he told the conference in Leeds, organised by the Pathfinder Teaching School Alliance: “Our management systems and structures in secondary look like they did in 2005, but our funding model has not kept pace with that.”

He gave the example of a 1,600-pupil secondary school he visited which had 45 people in its “extended leadership team”.

Sir David said that, at a meeting to discuss the school’s deficit, “no one in the room other than me was making a connection between the two things”.

Big senior teams ‘a thing of the past’

He added: “The idea that you can continue to have big senior teams and big middle leadership teams in secondary is one of the things we need to think about.

“What I am seeing around the country is an emergence of a very small leadership team in secondary: a principal, vice-principal, maybe an assistant, who are the cabinet, set the vision, set the pace, set the strategy, within a much flatter structure below of young people, often middle leaders, who are developing their subject expertise, to deliver that vision.”

The other alternative he outlined was a “flat leadership team”, whose members “have responsibility for a whole-school initiative, a curriculum area, a welfare area”.

He also told delegates that he had seen a link between financial sustainability and educational standards.

He said that while they were often seen as two separate tracks, “what I have seen in this job in the last 12 months is a really close correlation between trusts and schools that are in financial difficulty, and two or three years later, sometimes quicker, educational standards declining because the resource that was there in the past is not there any more”.

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