Our associate expert Graeme Hornsby has significant experience of school business management, including working with academies and multi-academy trusts (MATs).
We spoke to him about how financial benchmarking could work at MAT level, and relay his advice below.
Internal benchmarking is an important tool
The most meaningful benchmarking you can carry out is internal benchmarking between your schools.
As with a regular school-level benchmarking exercise, your trust's internal benchmarking might look at:
- The percentage of each school’s budget spent on staffing
- Facilities spending
- Spending on course or curriculum materials
Look behind the headline figures
For example, rather than simply looking at the overall percentage of spending on staff, you'll be able to look at details such as the spread of teacher and support staff salaries across the pay scales, or the 'contact ratio' (the percentage of staff