The first time I had an element of financial control in education was for a year group budget, and I was pretty naive. I knew I had to write a development plan but costing it was another thing entirely. I’d had no training on how to do this, so figures were randomly plucked from the air. I had no idea how to forecast or even use the previous year’s balance sheet as a guide. My budget was a best guestimate: as long as there was a supply of purple pens and stickers, I thought it was fine. And no one told me otherwise.

Unfortunately, though, it meant that I’d failed to prioritise the requirements of our School Improvement Plan, which ultimately led to a budget overspend that impacted on the whole school.

It is a school leader’s responsibility not to make assumptions about what people can and can’t do, to know their colleagues well and advise them how to effectively manage their budgets, whatever their size. They need to get better at preparing those coming up the ranks.

Be clear on the calendar

I recall when a colleague became head of English, he had no idea that the end of the financial year differed from the end of the academic year. When it arrived, he had not spent any of his £7,000 budget and so lost the cash to the central pot.

Leaders should provide all colleagues with an overview of the school’s financial year: critical points for the finance team, ordering deadlines, when invoices are paid, when electronic bank remittances are sent, deadlines for cost transfers and auditors’ visits, and so on. This will help teams to plan accordingly and avoid last-minute panic buying to ensure that all the budget is spent.

Utilise skills

School leaders should draw on the skills their colleagues already have. Our head of maths was used to doing VAT returns in the job he’d had before becoming a teacher, and he is an excellent source of support for colleagues new to running a budget. Meanwhile our head of technology has helped other staff to keep an eye on their spending. He developed a spreadsheet to manage his own resource-heavy department, which led to the building of a database to monitor spending. This allowed the accurate forecasting of month-by-month spending for the following year. Sharing best practice like this among all staff is incredibly useful.

Make finance visible

One of the more challenging aspects of managing a budget is when team members photocopy and use reprographics services without considering the cost, which then leads to an overspend. A colleague recommends always leaving a 5 per cent contingency in the pot for these little shocks. Another way to support runaway expenditures, such as photocopying, is to have a reprographics department price up every item of stock and services to the last penny and then publish the details so that every member of staff knows what their request will cost. Paperwork to support this and a requirement for a budget-holder’s signature for any reprographic request is a quick and easy way of building in checks and balances as you go.

Collaboration opportunities

Professional learning sessions are a great way for budget holders and the finance team to come together to discuss ways of streamlining processes or to tackle the problem of failing to get the spending figures to tally with the allocation at the end of the spending year. Teams may say that they have meticulously put every order through the database so know exactly what has been spent, but the figures rarely correspond with what is left at the end of the year. People can feel frustrated when they believe they have planned well and retained evidence of their costs only to be told that they have overspent. A biannual dialogue can support everyone to become more accurate with the money they manage.

The importance of saying ‘no’

Teach all budget holders to assertively say “no”. Teachers are usually the most helpful of people and they often want to support their team as much as they can, but good financial literacy is about saying no when a purchase is not part of the School Improvement Plan or does not impact on teaching and learning. Sessions within the CPD programme around assertiveness and conflict resolution can be built in to middle-leader training to give people the confidence to have these more challenging conversations with their co-workers.

HR bootcamp

Between 70 and 80 per cent of the budget goes on staffing, so when it comes to spending wisely, the most important financial decision a school leader can make relates to recruitment. Therefore, it is a good idea to provide basic training in HR recruitment and selection best practice as part of middle and senior leadership CPD.

This improves everyone’s skills, supports a model of distributed leadership and tightens up the process for finding the right candidate. A poor appointment can be the biggest drain on a school budget in terms of the time and energy people spend on dealing with the resulting problems. A headteacher I knew in Rochdale used critical incident interviewing techniques to assess people’s skills. The evidence was clear: a low turnover of employees, high staff attendance and, most importantly, excellent outcomes for students.

Ruth Golding is head of school at Tor Bridge High in Plymouth