Efficient procurement has never been more important; school business professionals need to be fully equipped with relevant and useful data if they are to keep their school finances on track.

Every year the DfE publishes school expenditure on their benchmarking website, available at https://www.education.gov.uk/sfb/login.aspx, which allows schools to look at their own spend and compare it to other schools, which can be statistical neighbours or even specific schools chosen by you. The statistical neighbours benchmarking is useful because it allows users to analyse where they have spent significantly higher (or indeed lower) than schools of a similar size and, in turn, allows them to investigate how that has come about.

Conducting a benchmarking analysis can lead to some good results. Imagine looking at the data and realising your school has spent significantly more than others on water or photocopying, for example. The user can hover over the data on the website to find out the school details so they can get in touch with the school and have a discussion. This could lead to a change in supplier or, perhaps, some more collaborative purchasing. What’s more, it’s a great tool for forming a business case should you need to go to the governors about additional spend.

To do this, you should:

• Access the DfE website.
• Choose the areas you want to explore.
• Select your criteria.
• Input the data into Excel.
• Analyse your spend.
• Produce results.
   

Caroline Collins FNASBM, MA(Ed) is a specialist leader of education, head of school business strategy & resources at Miles Coverdale Primary School.

​