The Department for Education is inviting organisations to bid for a contract worth at least £7 million to supply schools with advisers to help manage their resources.
The new contract offers between £7 million and £9.2 million for up to three organisations that will “identify, supply and manage” a cohort of school resource management advisers (SRMAs) and school business professional (SBP) mentors.
SRMAs go into schools and provide advice on how to best use revenue and capital resources. They are often experienced school business leaders.
The contract will start on 1 September this year and last for three years until 31 August 2027, with an option to extend for a fourth year.
The DfE has issued a new contract because it believes the programme has been a success to date.
School budgets: supplying SRMA support
However, school sector leaders have voiced some concerns about the programme.
Leora Cruddas, chief executive of the Confederation of School Trusts, said: “Helping school trusts operate more efficiently is the right principle, but the current SRMA programme has been too uneven in its delivery.
“While some trusts have received useful advice, others report receiving unrealistic recommendations.
“Trusts are facing increasingly tight budgets and will take some convincing that this is the best way of helping them tackle the funding challenges on the horizon.”
The DfE is also looking for one organisation to deliver a training and accreditation process for three more years.
This new contract will start after an existing contract for the accreditation, supply, mentoring and deployment of SRMAs comes to an end on 31 August 2024.
The original budget for the existing SRMA contract was listed as £6.7 million over three years. The Education and Skills Funding Agency had originally said it wanted to contract organisations to deliver 200 accredited SRMAs per year under this contract.
This original contract was awarded to Education Performance Improvement for accreditation, the Institute of School Business Leadership (ISBL) for supply and mentoring, and North Yorkshire County Council for supply.
Schools ‘must have the final decision’
Emma Harrison, business leadership specialist at the Association of School and College Leaders, said it “remains important that schools are able make the final decision over what will work well in their context and are not under pressure to action SRMA recommendations in situations where this is not the case”.
Ms Harrison added that the savings made as a result of the SRMA programme are valuable but small compared with the funding pressures that many schools are facing.
Tes revealed back in 2022 that some schools had faced waits of up to five months to get the financial help from advisers they had asked for.
The DfE first dispatched SRMAs to schools under the programme in a pilot project during the 2017-18 academic year. Lord Agnew, who was academies minister at the time, said that more than £35 million of “essentially misdirected resources” were identified at 70 schools visited during the pilot.
An evaluation of the pilot in 2020 found that less than half of the savings identified were savings that trusts said they were able to implement.
More recently SRMAs have often been recommended by regional advisory boards to trusts when discussing school conversions and sponsorships.
A Department for Education spokesperson said: “The school resource management advisers programme supports schools, academy trusts and local authorities to help them best use their revenue and capital resources, targeted at school improvement and pupil needs, ensuring best value for pupils for every pound spent.
“Due to the success of the programme so far, we’re looking to expand the service so that more education settings can benefit from it.”
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