Uncertainly over funding is making it hard for academies to carry out new financial forecasts required by the Department for Education, a top official has said.

In March 2018 the DfE’s Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) told academy trusts that they would have to start giving it three-year budget forecasts.

The aim was to promote financial forecasting as good practice and demonstrate that trusts are “undertaking strategic budget planning in line with best practice”.

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Mike Pettifer, the ESFA’s director, academies and maintained schools, told today’s Schools and Academies Show that the agency had consulted “long and hard” with the sector about the new requirement.

He said: “It always comes up as a topic, and there are people who are very supportive of it, and people who are less so.

“I think it’s really important but I also recognise that it can be very frustrating and difficult for finance directors and school business professionals to cast ahead three to five years when there are lots of policy and funding questions they don’t have the answer to.

“There are financial pressures in the system, and they might not feel they know enough, and that’s true, without a doubt.

“I still think, though, that the process of going through three-to-five-year financial forecasting, the discussion it provokes within the board, within the senior leadership team and the teaching staff, is a really, really beneficial exercise.”

Mr Pettifer told the audience that all three-to-five-year business planning requires people to make assumptions.

He added: “Sometimes I know you would like a little bit more guidance and certainty from ourselves in order to make those assumptions, and we try and provide that as often and as regularly as we can.

“We can’t do it for everything and certainly the further ahead you get, three to five years, the more difficult it is.”

He told the audience that judging from the forecasts that he had seen from academy trusts, the “benefits should outweigh the negatives by far, I would say”.