It is often said in management that you cannot improve what you do not measure. But in education, particularly when it comes to managing school budgets, there is the maxim: you cannot manage what you do not control.
According to data from ChatGPT (synthesised from several recent funding reports), the average breakdown of school expenditure is as follows:
- Staff salaries and benefits: approximately 70% to 80%
- Premises costs (utilities, maintenance): 10% to 15%
- Educational supplies and resources: 5% to 10%
- Administrative expenses: 3% to 5%
- Catering and pupil services: 3% to 5%
This paints a fairly consistent picture with my own experience. The overwhelming majority of spending goes on staffing, and rightly so. Schools are human-centred organisations. But when budgetary pressures mount, it becomes clear just how little flexibility school leaders really have.
Some categories, such as administration and facilities, are simply not the problem. In over ten years working in schools, I have never encountered an administrative team that felt bloated. If anything, admin staff are often overstretched and undervalued. Similarly, while I don’t claim deep knowledge of catering or site management, I suspect that the marginal gains available through further “efficiencies” are minimal, and would likely come at the cost of working conditions or dignity.
That leaves two major areas to consider: salaries and resources. But neither of these is easily addressed.
The Illusion of Flexibility
With upwards of 70% of the budget allocated to staff salaries, it might seem like an obvious lever. But in reality, it is almost unimaginable (under the current model) how meaningful savings could be realised without a significant impact on delivery.
Unless one believes that schools are currently overstaffed (and surely no one does), reducing the wage bill would mean fewer teachers delivering more classes, larger class sizes, etc. In secondary schools, particularly, the logistics of timetable delivery already sit at the edge of what is possible. There is no easy “trim” here as many recent news stories have made clear.
I wrote in a previous post about the possibility of blended learning. It is not impossible to imagine a future where well-designed digital lessons could supplement in-person teaching, with staff being used more strategically. But such a future would require something we conspicuously lack: quality digital resources, created at scale, and deployed with coherence. I assert that many innovations require joined up thinking from multiple public or private functions. Consider Amazon Prime which is dependent upon digital infrastructure, inventory management, and delivery logistics, or the Singaporean education system which I have written about before.
Here is a key problem: the government has devolved responsibility for resource creation, and thus it does not have the scope of expertise or even authority to realise such innovation. I suspect that (brought about by financial necessity) the large multi-academy trusts will be the first to make moves in the direction. On a side note, I am personally open to the idea of making Maths Advance freely available to all UK schools and could arrange this through the government for an incredibly tiny fraction of the cost that schools incur signing up to maths challenges each year. The government is not in the room unfortunately.
A Zero-Sum Game
We are stuck in a zero-sum game. Savings result in shortfalls in delivery. Improvements in delivery result in unsustainable costs. This is not just a challenge for schools, but a structural pattern repeated across much of the public sector. Each of these debates becomes circular: how can we spend less while delivering more?
The core problem is not just lack of money. It is also a lack of coherent strategic thinking about the relationship between funding, control, and outcomes. We can only manage budgets and deliver at scale if we control the delivery mechanisms. We can only innovate if we are present in the space where innovation is happening. Right now, the government is absent from that space.
As long as that remains the case, the conversation will stay stuck. So will education more generally, and so many other aspects of the public realm.
Another blog post, coming soon.
George Bowman
Founder, Maths Advance
MATHS ADVANCE BLOG 
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