Introduction

The Self-Assessment Dashboard helps to provide school business professionals with assurance that they are meeting the basic standards necessary to achieve a good level of financial health and resource management. The dashboard tool can be used to identify possible areas for investigation and improvement to ensure that resources are being used to support high-quality teaching and the best education outcomes for pupils. The dashboard shows how a school’s data compares to thresholds on a range of statistics that have been identified by the Department for Education as indicators for good resource management and outcomes.

Using the results from the dashboard

The dashboard provides red, amber or green (RAG) ratings against a school’s data that indicates how its spend and characteristics compare with similar schools or nationally recognised bandings and recommendations:

• A red rating shows the school’s data is significantly out of line with schools with similar characteristics or recognised characteristics. It does not mean that there is definitely a problem, but that there may be scope for change,

• an amber rating shows that the school’s data is considerably out of line with the majority of similar schools or recognised characteristics,

• a light green rating shows that the school’s data is in line with the majority of other schools or recognised standards - it does not necessarily mean that there is no scope for change,

• a dark green rating shows that the school’s data is close to the middle of similar schools or better than recognised standards. Not all indicators will generate a dark green rating.

The school should carefully consider the results for each indicator. For example:

• Why might the rating against the threshold be as it is?

• If the school is an outlier, are there any follow-up actions – for example, further investigation or changes to be made?

• If so, the Schools financial benchmarking service or School performance service can be used to identify schools to contact and learn from.

In addition, the Supporting excellent school resource management strategy provides access to detailed advice and support - both existing and planned - that the department is making available to help schools reduce cost pressures and make every pound spent count.

This includes links to a growing list of national deals to help save money on some of the things schools buy regularly as well as support on managing the school workforce.

Number of school employees that have a gross annual salary of £100,000 or more in increments of £10,000 = 0