3 Surefire Ways to Reduce Your School Staffing Costs
Teachers, along with their students, are the heart of any school or academy. So it’s no surprise that paying for them is one of the biggest costs you have to deal with when it comes to school budgeting and forward planning.
Staffing costs make up a huge proportion of school expenditure — generally between 80 and 85%.
That’s why any increase in payroll costs will have a undeniable impact on your school budget. In fact, the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) cite these rising costs as the biggest financial pressure currently facing schools in the UK. Growing pay scales, pension contributions and national insurance mean school budgets have been stretched by more than 5.5% each year.
It’s true that a great teacher is worth every penny you spend on them. The difficulty comes in trying to be as efficient as possible with the staff you have. Luckily there are ways to cut yours costs while keeping standards high.
Here are three excellent tactics to reduce your school staffing costs:
1. Work with accurate figures
There’s no way you can reduce costs in your school if your numbers are all wrong to begin with. An ideal place to start is by verifying your data.
Check that your staff information is still up-to-date. Have any changes in hours or pay scales been accounted for? Are you aware of any legislative updates to pay or pensions that might impact your budget? Then take a look at other figures that can help, such as school budgets from previous years as a benchmark for staff expenditure or exam results to show you which departments are performing better than others.
There are some unplanned-for spends you’ll never truly know the cost of until they sneak up on you — but you should try and budget for them anyway. These “known unknowns” can include new starters or staff going on maternity leave. Always leave some room in your budget for the unexpected and you’ll be much less likely to find yourself short of cash.
2. Be smart about thinking ahead
The key to lowering your staff costs is to plan long-term and make steady changes for the better. Losing your hardworking staff members isn’t the right approach. Instead think about growing responsibilities, making investments and encouraging flexible working.
With enough forward planning, you can avoid the sudden cuts that tend to lead to job losses and instead gradually eliminate inefficiencies in your school.
Here’s an example. Say a staff member is retiring. Instead of automatically replacing them with someone with similar experience and skills, consider what your needs actually are and how you can manage this transition in the most effective way possible.
Perhaps other members of staff could cover the classes left without a teacher. Perhaps another full-time staff member isn’t really needed, and part-time would do. Or perhaps the department wants a slightly less experienced teacher or a more experienced specialist who could handle multiple teachers’ duties. Ask yourself these questions and you may discover a surprising adaptability to your staff that can serve to reduce costs and improve satisfaction.
3. Use curriculum planning software
Don’t rely on doing all this hard work yourself. Good curriculum planning software can pull together data on everything we’ve mentioned so far, allowing you to create long-term forecasts and calculate KPIs like pupil-teacher ratios, average class sizes and teacher FTEs.
Our School curriculum software gives you all the information and tools you need to better model, manage, and reduce your staff costs.
It enables you to:
- Create detailed five-year forecasts in curriculum and staffing resources
- Accurately model curriculum change scenarios to inform your planning
- View all your KPIs at a glance with a visual dashboard
- Produce a range of reports for key stakeholders, including staff costs by subject
Overall, you’ll have the power to understand — and then change — your staffing costs. Calculate the expenditure of every subject. Analyse teacher load and discover how staff members could be deployed more efficiently. Reduce non-productive time outside of the classroom. Work out the true affordability of your curriculum and make critical decisions to improve the effectiveness of your school budget.
It’s not easy, but by carefully planning ahead with some solid data to back up your choices, you can save money on staffing costs without sacrificing quality of education. For more advice on how to grow income, cut costs, and make smarter decisions about the future of your school or academy, download our guide to School Budgeting.
