Tight budgets, rising costs, and increasing SEND requirements are the norm for most school trusts.
But even in tough times, carefully consolidated data and the right analysis tools can turn challenges into opportunities.
In this guest blog post, Honeycomb Education Trust chief executive Jim Nicholson explains to IRIS Education’s managing director Simon Freeman how his team have benefited from building a system that collects and shares information across the trust, uses tools like reforecasting to make better decisions, and the importance of asking the right questions before considering trust growth.
Simon: We know budget challenges are being cited as the main issue for trusts and schools right now. More than four-fifths of leaders told us this in a recent survey. Is your trust having the same experience?
Jim: I’m definitely among those who see budget constraints as a serious challenge.
A school year inevitably brings difficult-to-predict factors. Recent examples include pay announcements, fluctuating energy prices, and increasing National Insurance. All of these mean you have to readjust and look even harder for new efficiencies.
That’s a real challenge for any one school. How did you find efficiencies and handle change as a trust?
We had to accept that change is a constant. Gone are the days when budgets prepared in spring could be relied on through autumn.
You have to be ready to adjust your plan as the year progresses.
That's why we now have a system that gathers as much data as possible from across our trust. That helps us understand how unexpected changes – and our responses to them – will affect our budget.
The quicker you can access this information, the better. Sometimes, generating a meaningful graph mid-meeting gives everyone the full picture. You have to act while the right people are sitting around the table.
How easy is it to access your data? For many leadership teams, we know it can be incomplete, scattered, and outdated.
We can access it very easily now. But without a joined-up, data-rich system, it would be a struggle.
When you try and dig out data manually, you get trapped in a continuous cycle; by the time a leader has found and presented data, it’s time for them to work on the next report.
That’s time better spent supporting staff, developing strategies, or helping pupils.
In my experience, there’s no such thing as ‘one-size-fits-all’. Every school needs a system built for its unique situation. What does this look like for Honeycomb Education Trust?
Our top priority was protecting the budget, so we wanted to ensure our finances became our nerve centre. All data from across the trust feeds into and out of that.
All this financial information can be accessed by the right people and used to reforecast when the unexpected happens.
Reforecasting is a powerful tool when you take away any guesswork. Once you see how a decision can affect everything from building maintenance to pupil experience, it’s invaluable.
It gives you something you don’t otherwise feel you have: choice.
The size of a trust can bring challenges, but it’s also meant to deliver advantages. Did your joined-up system help you with that?
Absolutely. When you are a trust, one of the things you can make the most of is buying power. We centralised procurement and narrowed the selection to a few, carefully chosen suppliers. As a result, we concentrate on the best vendor relationships and the best prices. That, of course, means consistent quality and money saved.
With that must come transparency. Decisions made at trust level need to be visible to schools, and vice versa.
Needless to say, a strong, protected budget goes a long way to improving the experience for everyone in your trust. However, are there some direct ways in which you can see joined-up data help pupils?
When you take data out of its silos, the possibilities become endless.
Pupil wellbeing is just one example. Now we can combine datasets like pupil attainment and attendance. That allows us to track patterns and intervene quickly when necessary.
Our advanced reporting system, meanwhile, helps us easily demonstrate the quantifiable relationships between operational decisions, financial impact and pupil success.
What advice do you have for schools and trusts? More than three-quarters are looking to grow over the next three years, so many might face a big challenge.
A joined-up system is really important; however, a school or trust needs to reflect that unified approach in how it works and grows.
If you expand too fast or fail to align new schools, then you end up with governance challenges and lost efficiency – the very opposite of what you hope to achieve.
Growth happens when trusts focus on collaboration and centralisation. The question always needs to be: “What can we do better together?” Each school you add brings new expertise that can make a difference to the bigger picture.
How do you suggest others take their first steps on this journey towards a position of strength, even when the sector faces a lot of uncertainty?
For any school or trust leader facing similar challenges, my advice is simple: start by evaluating your systems and identify gaps or silos that hinder efficiency. Then explore tools that connect these pieces and provide the data you need to adapt, grow, and thrive.
When you do that, you become one, unified trust that’s built for success and prepared for any challenges that lie ahead.
- IRIS Education is a community supporter of CST's Data and digital transformation professional community
We welcome perspectives from a diverse range of guest contributors. The opinions expressed in blogs are the views of the author(s), and should not be read as CST guidance or CST’s position.
