Schools have faced five-month waits to get the financial help from government-appointed advisers that they have asked for, Tes can reveal.

The delay has been criticised as “far too slow” by school leaders facing severe financial challenges, who say the advice risks being out of date by the time it arrives, due to pay awards and fluctuating energy prices.

Under the Department for Education’s school resource management adviser (SRMA) scheme, schools are visited by advisers, generally experienced school business leaders, to “help leaders identify new opportunities to make better use of their funding”.

The scheme has been controversial, with some leaders criticising the advice they have received. However, requests for the visits have shot up by more than a third in the first two months of this academic year, compared with last (65 requests compared to 89), DfE data obtained by Tes reveals.

But none of this year’s requests had been completed as of 9 November, and data taken from the same period last year shows schools waited for an average of 154 days to receive recommendations after asking for help.

Stephen Morales, chief executive of the Institute of School Business Leadership - one of two suppliers of the scheme - said visits needed to be quicker given the huge challenges facing schools.

The DfE said it has a process for managing “urgent” requests, but Mr Morales said that visits could be “quite an undertaking”, with an SRMA needing to see minutes, accounts and review documentation, followed by further conversations, and that this lengthy process needed to be quicker.

He said: “Given the pressure schools are currently under, the turnaround for the visits do need to be quicker - 100 per cent - and the visits need to be a lot more focused. The shift now needs to be to a much more focused, quicker and agile conversation in the face of challenges schools are confronting, and need to continue to move in this direction.”

Schools on the receiving end of visits also found it challenging to find the time “to face a long visit, with lots of back and forth”, he added.

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Matthew Shanks, the executive principal and CEO at Education South West, said that the “to-ing and fro-ing is not helpful” and that the time frame overall was “far too slow”.

Robin Bevan, the headteacher at Southend High School for Boys, agreed that a five-month wait for advice was “far too long”.

Funding announcements, such as those on pay, “come so rapidly and with so little lead-in time”, he said, and “if a report is going to be useful, it needs to be at that point in time”. 

Vic Goddard, co-principal of Passmores Cooperative Learning Community, a trust in Essex, said he was contacted and offered an SRMA visit earlier this year following media appearances in which he had referenced funding pressures in schools.

He agreed to a visit but has heard nothing since. “Changing costs mean that whatever advice is given is out of date by the time they have clicked print on the report,” he said.

And Julia Harnden, funding specialist at the Association of School and College Leaders, echoed these concerns: “Most schools are beyond the point where they can afford to wait several months for advisers to visit, and beyond the point where advisers are likely to be able to identify significant additional savings in any case.”
 

The cost-saving programme has proved controversial since its introduction, which came after a pilot five years ago. 

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.

‘Not an army of cost-cutters’

Mr Goddard told Tes this week he doubted SRMAs would “be able to tell us any option we haven’t thought of and either done already or dismissed due to the impact on the community”.

But Mr Morales said the scheme was “useful to many”, and that he didn’t want people to “lose faith” in it.

He said: “This initiative shouldn’t be seen as finding savings to cut funding, it’s about identifying efficiencies (process and spend) to re-invest back in education. We’re not an army of cost-cutters.”

Mr Bevan said he had been visited by an SRMA last year, and that there was “real value” in the visit, although he flagged that various suggestions in the report were “mutually incompatible - you could do A or B, but not A and B”.

Similarly, Mr Shanks said he was “confident” that the average speed of visits was something ESFA chief David Withey would “address” in the near future. There is a lot of knowledge within multi-academy trusts (MATs), he added, saying he “would be supportive of SRMAs who work within MATs to be deployed to support others”.

The ESFA said the timeframe for visits was “largely dictated by school availability”, and that the overall 154-day figure includes the period between the request and the actual start date, “which can be weeks or sometimes months”, as schools choose a start date that suits them.

A DfE spokesperson said that the department offered “focused support” via the SRMA programme that “could be shorter” than a typical five-day review if needed.

“If a trust or school needs advice and support quickly, we have a process for managing urgent requests and can often deploy an adviser within a few days”, they added.