Aug 30, 2019
For this episode Tim Warneford speaks online via Skype to Julie Cordiner, Independent Education Funding Consultant about her work in education finance for schools and academies, the successes and the struggles of the schools academies sector and her passion for education.
On this episode we cover:
How education was her own route out of poverty
Education being her passion
Opportunities for children they wouldn’t otherwise have
Working in education for 30 years
Being drawn into special needs
Returning to the finance side
School leaders starting off as teachers or admin
Being very little specific training in financial management side
Being on a mission to raise the profile in financial leadership
Drawing together fragmented information and making it easier to access
Tim working in social housing
Seeing the link between environment and output
Some schools not providing the optimal learning environment
School leaders being thrown into a massive responsibilities
Not being able to be an expert in everything
Knowing where to find the right people with those specialisms
Seeing a lot of school business managers struggling
Where Julie sees the successes the academy system has brought
Julie’s experience being mixed across LEA and academies
Academies having been successful when they have a strategic grip on their distinct things
DFEA being a bit misleading about the extent on the freedoms of academies
Where freedoms have been used they have been innovative
Academies being open about collaborating
Seeing some great MAT examples with special needs and disadvantages pupils
The choice of centralisation versus local autonomy
Some MATs doing aggregated procurement well
Some MATs having a good pool of school improvement specialists
The plight of the primary school that doesn’t want to be in a MAT
The difficulty of smaller primaries struggling with the emphasis on amount per pupil
The national funding formula brought the funding down
How it’s not only academies that can collaborate
Some LEA school collaborating with education partnerships
Schools engaging the community and using out of hours for revenue streams
Schools developing an income generating strategy
How understanding the community is very important
Where Julie sees the negative aspect of academy system:
DFE’s willingness to recognise the sector needs more money
2015-17 particular drain on resources
A huge brake on any responsiveness to changes in need
For the third year running there’s an increase in children with additional needs
The level of funding and the distribution of it just not doing the job
Frustration that academies is seen as the answer to everything
Schools are schools – not much difference between academies and LEA schools on a day to day basis
The government pitting one set of schools against another
Some LEA schools and academies working well together
‘Appalling waste’ in the DFE
The UK Statistics Authority wading in
‘Most academies living hand to mouth and can’t provide the basics’
Condition improvement funding being almost means tested
The majority of schools being in some sort of deficit
The poorer schools being continually punished
Schools being pushed into larger trusts for DFE convenience
The bigger trust getting school condition allocations not being subjected to an SRMA visit
The pressure on small trusts being pushed into larger ones by the DFE
Lord Agnew having a skewed view of waste in schools
Being far better to give schools the skills to do their own SRMA
How building capacity is the way to go
Tim talking to the ISBL about owing a duty of debt to the 14,000 schools yet to academise
Julie not accepting that all 14,000 LEA schools will eventually become academies
Lots of schools doing very well without become an academy
Needing greater understanding about serving all types of schools
Julie suggesting a forum where school leaders could share their biggest concerns
More joint approaches needed
Suppliers and professionals needing to get together and collect best-practice case-studies
Julie’s aim to help schools and academies understand what effective financial leadership means; being about achieving sustainable budgets, equipping governors to challenge and support better, wanting to try to make DFE see that they need to trust in the sector more, believe it when the sector say they need funding and top interfering at the operation level and instead focus on giving a strategic framework with core funding predictions
Julie’s book - Forecasting Your Schools Funding
The sector just wishing to be heard
DFE operating on a very minimal capacity
As yet being no spending settlement
The sector being in a funding crisis