The good, the bad and the excess

Released 27/02/2009

As the NCSL focuses on developing SBMs, the issue of school surpluses raises its head again. By Suzannah Wright

Lots of interesting news this week for those of us concerned with school business management. First the good news: developing SBMs and advanced SBMs remains a priority for the National College of School Leadership.

The NCSL wisely understands that developing good business management is a key part of tackling the national shortage of headteachers in schools, and an essential element of building school leadership teams for the 21^st century.

Having read the news, and musing on the headteacher recruitment crisis, I was struck by an article in The Times titled ‘How a good headteacher can save a school'. Groaning at the perpetuation of the ‘hero head' image, I read on to find the article did make a lot of sense.

In it, Francis Gilbert contrasted a headteacher "who had agonised, Hamlet-like, over the complexities of all the decisions she had to make" with her replacement, who "is obsessed with imposing good discipline and getting the children to work hard." The hero figure replacement head, "walks around the school with a loudspeaker and fusses endlessly over the state of the pupils' uniform."

I suspect it isn't only me who thinks that if a head has time to patrol corridors fussing over pupils' uniform, he or she is in all likelihood backed up by a brilliant business management and leadership team to help with those complex decisions and operational issues. ‘How a good SLT can save a school' isn't quite as catchy, but wouldn't it be great if a national paper could encourage people to see successful schools as the result of teamwork rather than resting on the shoulders of a superhead.

And so to the bad news. Or is it good news? DCSF figures show that schools held £2bn of surpluses at the end of the 2007-8 academic year. Though only £592m of this is what the DCSF deems ‘excess surplus', debate followed as to whether this showed prudent planning, or a greedy misappropriation of money aimed for current students to fund projects for the future. Whichever side of the fence you come down on, schools might want to take note of what has been happening to NHS surpluses this year.

At £1.7bn, the NHS surplus in 2008 was slightly less than that of schools overall. The Department of Health praised the good finance management which had generated this surplus, but also announced that organisations would only be allowed to spend £400m of it this year. Time will tell how the DCSF reacts to the latest surplus figures but it seems to me that the word claw back could become a familiar one for many schools over the next few months.

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