The Government introduced financial benchmarking into education some years ago to try to compare the financial performance and expenditure of schools of similar sizes, locations and socio-economic factors, so that they can be compared in a meaningful and relevant way.
Clicking on the link below will take you to the relevant page of the Government’s Schools Benchmarking website.
https://schools-financial-benchmarking.service.gov.uk/school/detail?urn=108862
The main page shows the reader some base data for Hetton School, including
- Overall spending
- Spending on staffing
- Premises spend
- Spend on supplies and services
- Facilities spending etc.
These figures are shown just for our school, but they are shown for the last 5 completed financial years, to allow the reader to see whether send is increasing, decreasing or staying static.
Depending when these charts are accessed, the data can be over a year out-of-date.
When the reader clicks on the green rectangle at the top of the page, this will take them through to being able to compare Hetton School to some other schools that the reader can tailor into a set that is most suitable for their purpose.
This will then compare our school with those other schools, but only for the most recently filed set of accounts. This could render the results a little more out of date, especially in the case of Academies whose finances are a little behind those of the maintained sector.
It also no longer shows whether spend is increasing or decreasing year-on-year.
Nevertheless these are powerful tools which, with a little interrogation can lead to some interesting conclusions about the relative financial security of a comparable set of schools.
