The Ever-Developing Role of the SBM - Just4SBMs

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The everdeveloping role of the SBM

Increasingly, there is an expectation and desire to see the role of School Business Managers evolve further by embracing a more developmental or entrepreneurial facet.

Alan Cowley asks ‘how can you develop your role?’

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t’s always useful to reflect on the journey covered when you’re planning the journey ahead. I was reflecting the other day about the remarkable change that we’ve seen over the last 20 years in the role that is now widely described as ‘the School Business Manager’ – probably your role.

Even at the entry level, studies have shown that the introduction of the School Business Manager’s role has had an amazingly positive impact on schools and the education of young people.

They have drastically reduced the workload of headteachers (to say nothing of reducing stress levels) and on average have produced savings far in excess of their costs.

In the past it was the School Bursar who kept the books and ensured that spending was accounted for. Then, in 1991, we saw the introduction of LMS, the Local Management of Schools, where schools could opt for varying degrees of autonomy over spending, managing a delegated budget and taking responsibility for the management of many of the services previously provided by local authorities. At the same time we also saw an increase in the number of support staff employed in schools, so Estelle Morris, who was then Secretary of State for Education, announced that 1000 School Business Managers would be provided over the next five years; it was an initiative that was to have a far-reaching and profound benefit on the education of young people across the country.

Studies have shown that the introduction of the School Business Manager’s role has had an amazingly positive impact

This role required an additional skill-set. It was no longer sufficient to have the ability to balance the books; a wider range of responsibilities was called for, such as managing the entire support staff body, negotiating contracts and managing tenders and the work of sub-contractors.

To facilitate this The National College of School Leadership introduced The Certificate of School Business Management, which was followed by The Diploma of School Business Management, then the Advanced Diploma of School Business Management and more recently The School Business Director programme.

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If the movement that created the School Business Manager’s role was driven by a desire to increase efficiency by devolving a greater share of the schools’ budget to schools, what then will be the impact on the role triggered by the advent of Academy or Free School status?

A study of recent advertisements for vacant School Business Manager positions shows a change in vocabulary. One that typified this change read: “To be part of the senior leadership team to introduce an entrepreneurial approach to the management of the school’s resources in order to promote and develop the highest achievement of both students and staff.”

It would appear that an additional skill-set is now being sought. So what might this ‘entrepreneurial

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approach’ look like, and how can you develop this practice within your school? In my work as a consultant I have the pleasure of visiting many schools, sometimes working with School Business Managers to provide an independent overview of how support might be developed within the individual context of each school. I have been privileged to see some amazingly creative developments, some of which I share with you now as a sliding scale of what I would consider entrepreneurial endeavour.

More importantly, each initiative achieves something that I think is particularly pertinent to the role of a good School Business Manager; it not only increases the money available to be spent on education within the establishment, it directly improves the education of the pupils in a way that wasn’t covered before.

The starting point has to be what we know already, and in the grand scheme of things school premises and lettings must rank as the most established area where a school can raise additional income. Most secondary schools allow access to sports fields and changing facilities at weekends, or use of the school sports centre during the evenings. My guess is that those schools who ten years ago provided access to small businesses to computer suites so that they could manage their accounts etc, have seen this service drop off as computers became more affordable and the digital world became so much a part of everyday life that ownership of a computer with broadband connection is as much an expectation of modern living as having your own car.

What facilities do you have within your school that others might be willing to pay for?

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As a service to small businesses, my local school offers photocopying at reasonable prices As I write this article, I am sitting in my office and to my right is my printer. I’m sure you understand from personal experience just how costly it is to use your computer printer for large print runs. On occasion when presenting a training course I am asked to bring

What facilities do you have within your school that others might be willing to pay for? photocopies of my presentations with me for all the delegates. This can prove quite expensive. As a service to small businesses, my local school offers photocopying at reasonable prices. They are certainly cheaper than using my office printer and substantially cheaper than small print shops would charge. Their prices are designed to return a small but worthwhile profit to the school to be reinvested in the pupils – a process I am keen to contribute to. Quite often, in a moderatelysized school, such services can be advertised by alerting the parents – it’s surprising how fast good news travels.

Of course, I realise that such services are commonplace; what delights me is when I find a school that had gone one step further, such as I encountered in the South West. The school had found two ways of improving the balance sheet through one purchase. They had bought a wide format printer which took rolls of paper or vinyl and produced massive banners or posters at a very cost-effective price. Local small businesses were using this service and were very happy with a high quality product at a greatly reduced price. Parents were also using the service to produce posters and banners for family members’ birthday celebrations etc. It was the second use however that I found really clever.

Providing high quality school displays is a time-consuming job. School walls are notoriously massive and even large notice boards can be lost amongst the length of a corridor. This school was using the wide format printer to copy pupils’ work and use it for display. A piece of artwork, when produced on a poster 16 times its original size, has an incredible visual impact and, perhaps more importantly, takes a fraction of the time to display. Inside, the public spaces were liberally decorated

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with the most eye-catching displays which could be renewed rapidly and so were always current. Outside, they had also made use of the banner facility to enliven the appearance of the school. These enhancements to the physical environment of the school had a tangible, positive effect on the ethos of the whole school community. Equally as important, they found that the time spent organising displays had been more than halved and so were able to reduce support staff time allocated to this task, making another saving.

It’s when you stop to think about the impact on learning that this has that the idea becomes really impressive. We have a long and happy tradition of displaying our children’s work on the walls of our classrooms and corridors – a tradition designed to showcase the children’s achievements, to inspire others and occasionally to highlight important issues. To be fair to teachers, who are asked to produce “something for options evening/parents’ evening/the wall outside the gym...”, most work produced in a class room is on A4 paper with a print size that won’t have a visual impact much beyond the display case, and certainly won’t inspire others or highlight issues if no-one reads it.

Doing the usual things in a new

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and stimulating way can also be reflected in an entrepreneurial approach. Staff training days represent an enormous investment in the education of our pupils. But how effective are they?

The goodwill generated when staff feel they are being treated is immeasurable One school I worked with in the Bristol area reported that the evaluation forms from teachers following the last few staff training days had been mostly negative.

I often think that if Ofsted were to judge schools’ training day provision in the same way that they judge our teaching staff in the classroom – some schools would be in serious trouble! The problem in the Bristol school centred around the fact that each training day had the same format starting with all staff in the school hall for the morning and then working in discrete groups in the afternoon.

I approached a local hotel with excellent conference facilities and put to them the idea of giving the school ‘at cost’ conference and lunch facilities. I sold it to them based on the fact that we would bring in over 100 new potential and relatively local customers, and that the partnership would be advertised to all the parents, which would hopefully produce additional business through goodwill. The improved impact on training would benefit the pupils (some of whom might be children of members of the hotel’s staff) and this would perhaps help with recruitment of staff in the future.

We also negotiated a discounted

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night rate for candidates for jobs at the school who were coming from out of area, thus increasing the hotel’s business. Above all, it would cost them nothing at a time when the downturn was already impacting on bookings.

The impact on staff was clear to see and was of course reflected in their evaluations. The day was seen very positively and, although the catering costs were slightly more expensive than those that would have been charged by the school’s caterers, the quality

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of the food at lunch and during refreshment breaks was far higher than that usually experienced by staff. The goodwill generated when staff feel they are being treated is immeasurable.

Perhaps the best example I have of a great entrepreneurial idea that actually wasn’t being fully exploited, came from a school in the Midlands. My visit was actually associated with something totally different and was scheduled to start in the afternoon and go on beyond the end of the school

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delighted at what I found. oints discussion p Possible SLT on for e school’s visi e What is th me through th gaining an inco rvices? provision of se urces do lities and reso What faci tly we don’t curren we have that ut b community share with the wanted to? e we could if w our d we invest in lity How coul prove the qua resources to im t making whils of the output same time? e savings at th

day. A few days before my visit I started to get phone calls from the Head asking me what time I planned to arrive. As I was driving down from Yorkshire I said that I would leave in plenty of time to arrive for a 1pm start, depending on the traffic probably between 12.00 and 1.00pm. His next phone call was to ask me if I could ensure that I would arrive at the school before 12.00 as it was important for me to have lunch with them. Intrigued, I arrived at the school, which was on the edge of a council estate, at 11.45, was welcomed into the school and then was amazed and

Each dish was out of this world and certainly the selection on the day I visited was equal to that found on the menus of some of the best restaurants I have eaten in

When the catering contract had been up for renewal, the school had taken a brave step. They had stopped the contract with a catering company and decided to ‘do their own thing’. In their book however, ‘doing their own thing’ required employing a cordon bleu chef! The results were staggering. Each day the kitchen provided three different meals for the pupils to choose from as well as salads, etc. Each dish was out of this world and certainly the selection on the day I visited was equal to that found on the menus of some of the best restaurants I have eaten in. At break times all snacks were provided by the kitchen, these were also healthy as well as being delicious. As a result of the school’s investment, every single pupil stayed for school lunch which could be bought for £1.50.

What’s more, the kitchen actually made a profit.

What I liked about this was not just the clever thinking that spotted that everybody likes and appreciates quality, or that young people from all backgrounds recognise the investment that you make in them. It was that throughout the country, schools have found that with the advent of a cafeteria-style approach to lunch times, more and more pupils have found their way off the school site, with their parents’ blessing. In most cases, schools where pupils are allowed to leave the school site during the lunch break report higher levels of disruption or lack of attention in the first period of the afternoon.

For many pupils who are just outside the threshold for Free School Meals (and for some who are within it but do not register) school meals provided by an

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outside catering company can represent poor value. This school had solved those problems at a stroke.

One thing that all of these ideas have in common is that they are all very simple: the best ideas often are I mentioned earlier that for me, this was an under-exploited opportunity. Why? As I’ve mentioned, the school was on the edge of a council estate and as I drove in and out of the school I saw a high number of elderly and retired people going to and from the local shops. It would have been an excellent service to offer meals for the elderly residents of the estate when the pupils had finished their lunch. This would have increased profits, provided excellent value and nourishment for a section of the community with restricted incomes, provide a social opportunity and meeting place for them and perhaps a willing set of volunteers for individual pupil mentoring.

One thing that all of these ideas have in common is that they are all very simple; the best ideas often are. As the role of the School Business Manager moves confidently into a new ‘entrepreneurial’ era in English education, what can you find within your school that can be more thoroughly exploited for the benefit of the pupils?

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