With increasing pressures on budgets, the one thing school business professionals ask me about is how to protect support staff and avoid them being made redundant.
When funds are limited, redundancies become a genuine threat and may even become necessary. Therefore, regular, objective reviews of all staff roles and responsibilities are a business imperative. Whether facing a financial challenge or not, it helps ensure all areas of staffing remain relevant, efficient, and cost-effective.
But in many schools, these reviews aren’t happening or only happen when forced as part of the redundancy process, risking automatic decisions that could potentially cost the school more than anticipated longer term.
Every project should start with a plan, and staff reviews are no different. Effective planning means being realistic about your current situation and creating a strategic approach to prioritise decisions.
Start with the school/trust’s development or improvement plan, ensuring the broader and longer-term context is central to review. Draw up business management and leadership plans that align with the plan and aim to provide the highest quality service across all business areas.
Draw up a review framework, determining how and why you will conduct the review, who is involved, and whom to report to, e.g. governors and senior leadership team (SLT). It might feel comforting to maintain the status quo, as change is the only constant in education, and doing nothing rarely makes good business sense.
Don’t assume staff understand tightening school budgets, especially when they might involve unpopular decisions
Language can be a formidable tool, so choose your words carefully. Focus the review on roles rather than names and summarise how each role contributes to teaching, learning, and the school’s overall success.
There is a fundamental difference between what SLT, and governors/trustees hear when you talk about “the school’s” finance assistant rather than “my” finance assistant. Choose the former and reinforce it with the impact that role has on teaching and learning; this is the language SLT and governors best understand.
Explain to staff why reviews are being conducted. Don’t assume staff understand tightening school budgets, especially when they might involve unpopular decisions.
Job security is invariably emotive, particularly during periods of personal financial uncertainty. So be empathetic, but make it clear your job is to minimise the school’s financial risks.
When asked to conduct support staff reviews, the organogram is one of my first points of reference, yet far too many schools can only offer me a staff list instead.
An organogram is a graphical visual representation of the school’s staffing structure. It illustrates roles, hierarchy, and relationships between managers and direct reports. Scrutiny of an organogram allows you to identify teams, overlaps, duplications, succession planning, and even shortages and gaps.
The organogram is only one element of the review but is used alongside job descriptions and contextualised understanding of roles and team structure. I find them invaluable, especially in complex organisations such as MATs.
Reviews benefit from both hindsight and foresight. Look back to understand when and why roles were instigated and how they have developed over time. Check previous review/s and any unresolved points on action plans and assess the impact of any actioned improvements.
PESTLE analysis can be helpful to tease out potential political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental factors, risks and opportunities that might impact the school/trust, allowing you to contextualise future support staff capacity requirements better.
Looking forward is, by its very nature, much less certain. But imagine allowing redundancies now when some foresight might identify future growth opportunities.
Aligning the review to recruitment planning now can help you consider more creative, even experimental, ways to fill gaps and reduce the risk of future redundancies.
I find one helpful technique to flesh out the organogram (see Step 3 above) with pay grades, hours, and hourly costs. It can now be used to analyse how hours and expenses are allocated across different areas and how well these allocations reflect current and future priorities identified in the SDP/SIP.
Take this a step further with a cost-benefit analysis, analyse each staff member as a costed resource and their benefit to the school. Then, especially if redundancy is considered, include detriment in the cost-benefit analysis to project the impact of losing the role.
So, for example, redundancy might resolve an immediate funding problem (but beware of pension strain and other redundancy costs). Another thing to look out for, when reviewing staff costs, it may reveal higher-paid workers undertaking lower-skill tasks.
Some examples to look for are:
With your colleague’s agreement, a cost-effective solution might be to sell a proportion of their services to partner schools and schools within the MAT, backfilling with staff on lower pay grades. This can also provide the senior colleague with a greater breadth of experience and succession planning.
The review should explore how effectively and efficiently staff work and where improvements can be made. It should align with the performance management process and consider how well staff work and if training might improve things.
Look at systems (including MIS) and processes to consider whether a more robust application might improve outcomes while reducing staffing costs. This is management; whilst your aim is to avoid redundancy, you still need to ensure cost-effective staffing.
An equally tough challenge is why tasks are done; as well as creating new ideas, leadership involves identifying and stopping the old. Check job functions (and habits) to ensure relevance and eliminate duplication.
There are many ways to objectively evaluate whole teams’ effectiveness, but I like to use Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
You’ll be familiar with SLAs and KPIs when procuring externally sourced service providers. It’s hard to imagine how to review contract effectiveness without such frameworks.
As part of the review, work with teams to draw up an SLA describing the following:
As well as supporting the review, this will reinforce teams (and their clients) that they work in a business context. They always aim to provide the school with the most efficient service within an agreed framework.
Your review must include end-users and focus on determining how well they feel their needs are serviced. These are likely staff, parents, pupils, and outside agencies.
Anonymised, online questionnaires work well, but so does simply sitting down and asking people. Ask new staff what they might find helpful, even during their induction. These are your support staff clients, so if they aren’t entirely satisfied, you need to know!
Despite all the challenges and anxieties facing the SBP role, we should look forward optimistically. Remember that we are leading complex business functions in 21st Century schools, facing unprecedented challenges.
We may be required to make decisions involving our support staff. But by conducting robust staffing reviews, we can be confident that we are making the best decision to protect our colleagues and their roles.
