Cherise Heavey, Communications and User-Engagement Lead from the School Resource Management (SRM) team, explains what the SRM offer is and what's coming up in 2023.
What is the School Resource Management (SRM) offer?
The SRM offer is a collection of free tools, guidance and support, available to all schools and academy trusts in England, to help build their resource management capability to achieve best value from all of their resources, and therefore maximise the impact on pupil outcomes.
You can access the full collection of free tools, guidance and support on the SRM collection page.
If you would like to hear some first-hand experiences of using the tools and services you can watch this video - and many more - on the SRM YouTube playlist.
What's new in the SRM offer?
In June 2022 we published the new School Resource Management: building a stronger system strategy which was developed in partnership with the sector and informed by sector needs. The SRM offer is not static, it is continuously evolving based on sector insights to address new challenges.
As part of this strategy, we have 3 key aims:
- For every school and academy trust to be led by those with the skills, knowledge and capability to achieve excellent school resource management.
- To support schools and academy trusts to recruit, develop and deploy their staff effectively and efficiently.
- To help schools and academy trusts get the best value and impact from their non-staff resources, so these can be directed in ways that will make a greater positive difference to children and young people’s outcomes.
The new strategy puts the professional at the heart of it. We are committed to ensuring that we are equipping you with the tools and support which you have identified that you need, to help you maximise your resources, ensuring they can then be reinvested back into front line activity and maximise the impact on pupil outcomes.
To support you in building that resource management capability and expertise we have some new announcements, including:
- Launching a new series of our training webinars covering a variety of SRM topics, which will be available from late 2023. You can view last year’s webinar series here: DfE Funded School Resource Management Webinars | Entrust (entrust-ed.co.uk).
- We now offer CFO mentoring as part of the School Resource Management Adviser (SRMA) programme, for more information contact the team at srma@education.gov.uk.
- We are piloting bursaries for Level 5 Diplomas for School Business Leaders. There will be limited places and set criteria must be met. We will announce more information on the bursaries in the Autumn, however for more information on the Diploma go to: Level 5 Diploma for School Business Leaders – Welcome to the School Business Management Partnership (sbmpartnership.org.uk).
- The launch of the new Estates Competency Framework, which is designed to support schools with their estate management. This sets out the standard skills and knowledge required by those conducting estate management functions, roles and responsibilities at different levels.
- The Institute of School Business Leadership (ISBL) have also published the revised ISBL Professional Standards , which we endorse and encourage employers and business professionals to read.
School Resource Management Summit 2023
In June we held the School Resource Management Summit 2023, a full day event covering all aspects of SRM. Over 300 school business professionals attended and provided great feedback, with over 97% advising they would attend a similar event in future.
You can watch recordings from the event, including a keynote speech from Baroness Barran (Minister for the School System), David Withey (CEO of the ESFA) as well as sessions delivered by many other senior officials and sector representatives on:
- Get help buying for schools
- Good estate management for schools
- Energy frameworks and sustainability
- Digital Standards
- The Teaching Vacancies service
- SRM capability and training.
To access the full suite of SRM Summit recordings email your full name, job title and the name of school or organisation to: school.resourcemanagement@education.gov.uk.
If you’ve found this article useful and want to learn more about how we’re supporting schools, click ‘sign up and manage updates’ to subscribe to our blog and receive notifications when we next post.
2 comments
Comment by Ilmu Forensik posted on
How does the SRM offer evolve and adapt to sector insights, and what are the three key aims outlined in the new strategy?
Comment by Cherise Heavey posted on
Thank you for your question.
To ensure the School Resource Management (SRM) offer continues to meet the needs of the sector, we collect insights and feedback through School Business Professional (SBP) roundtables, insight groups and educational events, as well as when schools and trusts engage with our tools and services. This enables us to continuously improve the offer. For example, we recently improved the View My Financial Insights (VMFI) tool to better support settings with Special Education Needs provision, based on feedback from schools. We have also recently adapted the School Resource Management Advisers (SRMA) programme to offer more flexible and tailored visits. Our SBP survey helps us further understand sector needs and challenges and this information informs the evolution of our offer.
The three aims for SRM, as set out in our School Resource Management: Building a stronger system (2022) strategy, are: for SBPs to have the skills, knowledge and capacity to achieve excellent school resource management, to support the recruitment, development and deployment of education staff and to help schools and trusts get the best impact from non-staff spend.
You can access all of the free tools and services I’ve mentioned here via the SRM collection page - https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/schools-financial-health-and-efficiency