Government cost-cutters have identified £292 million in potential savings in schools - a 20 per cent increase on the previous year, according to a new report.
The figure is contained in the Education and Skills Funding Agency’s annual report and accounts for 2021-22.
The ESFA is an arm’s-length-body of the Department for Education that administers funding for schools.
It has been employing “school resource management advisers” (SRMAs) tasked with finding savings in schools, after piloting this approach five years ago.
The ESFA’s annual report says that in 2021-22, 366 SRMA visits were carried out.
These visits, it adds, found ”£292 million of potential savings for reinvestment, an increase of nearly 20 per cent from the previous year.”
However, it does not identify the nature of the savings, or say whether schools and trusts accepted the recommendations.
School funding: cost savings identified
The cost-saving programme has proved controversial since its introduction.
In 2018 Lord Agnew, who was academies minister at the time, was criticised after he bet “a bottle of champagne” for any school where he could not find waste, in a speech to school leaders.
He told the Schools and Academies Show: “I think we’re only just getting warmed up on this, but I have to admit I’m like a pig hunting for truffles when it comes to finding waste in schools.”
The DfE has also been criticised by school business managers for creating a narrative that schools “are incapable of managing their budgets”.
Last year the National Audit Office said that the SRMA programme had helped schools and academy trusts to make savings, but the ESFA’s incomplete data meant “it cannot fully assess the impact of the programme”.
In its new report today, the ESFA says it has “made substantial improvements to our data since last year”.
The ESFA accounts published today give an overview of the funding it is responsible for.
They show that, in 2021-22, the agency delivered £1.145 billion of additional funding across 14 funding streams in response to the Covid pandemic.
The report says the ESFA had worked with other government departments to implement multiple new grants in response to policy initiatives for Covid-19, including Universal Catch-up (£270 million), Recovery Premium 3 (£153 million) and the National Tutoring Programme 4 (£217 million).
Academy trust concerns
The report also notes how, during the past academic year, 1,195 financial and governance concerns cases relating to academy trusts were closed, with 83 per cent of these within the initial target time - an 11-percentage-point improvement on the previous year.
It says the number of trusts of concern had reduced over the course of the year.
The report says the number of trusts of most significant concern and the number in active intervention both reduced by around one-third; and the number of active “Notices to Improve” to academy trusts fell from 37 in April 2021 to 29 in March 2022.
