* Your article said exactly what I have been trying to get over to the LEA with little successHead, Avon * I recognise many of the difficultiesyou highlight and sometimes anguish over similar problemsDeputy head, Wirral * I am struggling with the businessof making ends meet on a budget of Pounds 3 million pounds and believe your approach can provide me with a route to finding ways of identifying areasfor possible savingsHead, Norfolk I argued recently (“The loneliness of the axe wielding head”, TES School Management Update November 1994) that it is the head and staff who have the enormous and stressful responsibility of making the school’s budget balance, year on year. Judging by the letters I have received in response from around the country, it is clear not only that the responsibility is being keenly felt but also that it is being borne largely alone by heads and senior staff in schools of every size.

Faced with annual uncertainty about the school’s delegated income, the pressing reality for the head lies in trying to address the inherited pattern of spending which has to be rolled over to the new financial year.

Some schools are attempting to set their patterns of expenditure in a wider context, perhaps by reporting the budget to governors with comparisons where they can be found. Individual schools have attempted to use published comparative data, like the Audit Commission study. one head sent me the set of Adding up the Sums tables carefully amended for his governors with hand-drawn bar charts for the schools, but many have commented on how limited in practice such material is.

Others described their attempts to establish local information exchange with other schools and I heard of examples of such arrangements operating informally in Avon, Leeds and elsewhere. However, a number of heads reported the practical difficulties of open exchange with schools who were also in direct competition for pupils, and some reported that their efforts had made very little progress. There were also tales of the frustration engendered when a group of school bursars agreed that information exchange would be a good thing in their area, and then discovered that their heads would not permit the budget data to be released to other schools.

Equally frustrating has been the received attitude of some LEAs, who have reportedly taken the view that budget data is owned by the individual schools and cannot be released to others, despite some heads arguing that such standard management information should be published annually. Indeed, in my own LEA a senior budget officer has told me since my article was published that such an information exchange would be at the very limits of the LEA’s strategic role, and even that there may be a case for charging schools to provide it. Little wonder that heads feel isolated as they try to manage their budgets when the view from county hall has such little practical understanding of the task involved.

So where do we go from here? Following the article, I joined SHA’s School and College Funding Committee, which meets several times a year in Leicester. The Secondary Heads’ Association is very willing to support an information exchange network through its members and possibly in developing budgeting workshops. I was also invited to the new School Effectiveness Division of the DFE, where Michael Stark is establishing a pilot information exchange project with some LEAs and primary schools. Having focused through its LMS Unit on how school funding is allocated by LEA formula, it is clear there is DFE interest in the outcome end of the systems as part of the wider debate about added value.

Some 25 schools around the country have now written to me and expressed a willingness to establish an information exchange network. I am currently following that up to see how many different school types (11-16, 11-18, urban, shire, size of school, size of sixth form) are represented, because it is the view of the SHA funding committee that it would be most helpful to link in that way. If there are not enough types represented then I will start working with whichever schools are interested. I am also drafting a protocol governing the basis on which the budget data would be exchanged between the participants, based on our experience in the North Yorkshire group.

An interesting question from the letters I have received has been who has practical responsibility for managing the budget in a school. Most of my correspondents have been heads, though some have been deputies, bursars or senior teachers (finance) with delegated authority for constructing and monitoring the annual spending programme. However, and whoever takes the lead on the matter, I now have no doubt that many schools would find it helpful to have access to comparative information as they grapple with managing their delegated funds. I have no doubt, either, that this will be most easily done by schools themselves brokering the arrangements, rather than looking to their LEAs.

As head of a Group 6 11-18 comprehensive of 1,650 pupils, I believe that it would probably be most helpful to share budget information with colleagues in similar schools around the country. That last point helps address the very real difficulty of establishing local networks, where open enrolment and local management create contradictory pressures, made even worse if there are GM schools present in a town. It does make it less likely, however, that information exchange will lead to meeting to discuss ideas, as happened in our North Yorkshire group. It also depends upon having sufficient schools willing to participate.

Most schools are currently awaiting more bad news from county hall, as the Standard Spending settlement for their LEA is translated into age weighted pupil unit values and pay settlement assumptions which won’t match cost realities in the next financial year. Heads know that investing energy in lobbying for higher spending at this stage of planning for next April is as effective as moving Titanic deck chairs around; the management reality is that the buck stops with the school, whatever sympathy and ring binders of advice come from the LEA in every post bag.

In order to make sense of their spending, heads need to judge where and how to manage their commitments against the money available, not least by comparing what they buy with other similar schools. I hope the information exchange I am working on will help in the process, and any more schools interested who have not already contacted me are very welcome to do so. Expenditure management for heads is all about life in the margins, and the more we can share about what we find there the more we can find better solutions to our particular budget problems.

Kevin McAleese is head of Harrogate Grammar School, Arthurs Avenue, North Yorkshire, HG2 ODZ.