The HFL Education Business Services Podcast - How can school leaders do more with less?

School leaders are under unprecedented pressure. With growing responsibilities, rising costs, and limited budgets, the challenge of delivering high-quality education while maintaining financial stability has never been greater.

In this episode, Catherine Loake, Director of Business Services at HFL Education, sits down with CEO Carole Bennett to explore how school leaders can navigate the reality of “doing more with less.”

The HFL Education Business Services Podcast is a series of short, practical conversations designed for busy school leaders navigating an increasingly complex landscape.

Hosted by Catherine Loake, Director of Business Services at HFL Education, each episode brings together expert insight, real-world experience, and honest discussion about the pressures facing schools today.

Bite-sized listening for headteachers, CEOs, school business leaders and governors, the series helps leaders step back from day-to-day pressures, reflect on the bigger picture, and explore practical ways to lead their organisations sustainably and strategically.

Host: Catherine Loake (Director of Business Services)

Guest: Carole Bennett (CEO)

Created by: Rachel Lodge, Paul Hayward, Biljana Miljkovic

Questions? Email podcast@hfleducation.org.

HFL Education (formally Herts for Learning)  is a not-for-profit organisation providing all the services, training and resources needed to deliver a great education to every child.  

Transcript

Catherine: Hello and welcome to the HFL Education Business Services podcast.
I'm Catherine Loake, the director of Business Services here at HFL Education.
We wanted to put this series of mini podcasts together,
because we recognise that the role of school leadership is growing ever wider and ever deeper,
and it's getting really tricky to find the time to unpack and get under the bonnet of all of those broader issues that leaders face.
And today I'm joined by Carol Bennett, who's the CEO of HFL Education.
And Carol, I'm genuinely really excited about sitting down and podcasting with you
because you bring almost this unique 360 perspective, from having been a
a teacher in your early days in education right through to now, system leadership.
So I think we're going to have a really rich conversation.
And today we're going to be asking how to school leaders do more with less.
I think I'm getting bored of hearing myself say, if we laid out all of the duties on schools, whether they're statutory or non-statutory, whether they're from the DfE, Ofsted, Health and Safety Executive, whether it's H.R legislation,
if we put them all on the table here and we costed them I don't think school budgets would come anywhere near totalling what is needed.
And so we're in this kind of unprecedented era where school leaders have cut, everything they can cut, and now we're having to find ways to do more with less.
What options are open to school leaders right now?


Carole: It's such a difficult balance, Catherine. And I think we really struggle in education because we give people mixed signals. The answer normally in life and in education is balance. But I'm afraid there are lots of pressures on lots of heads and CEOs that take them in multiple directions, which means it's really, really hard to find your way through.
I think you're right. It's really easy to either prioritise educational excellence or financial excellence, and either of which can take you down a really difficult path. It's going to be always about having a really clear vision of what matters to you in your community and drowning out the noise so you really prioritise your financial imperatives against your educational imperatives.
That's the most important thing to do is start with a vision. Start with your community on what matters, and then align everything around that. Because if you read all of the DfE policy documents, if you try and budget everything equally according to what the policy says you should do, I think you're right Catherine, you end up tying yourself in knots and feeling like a complete failure because it can't all be done.
And it certainly can't all be done as well as each other.
And that's kind of a lesson from basic classroom practice, actually. It's always been the same. You know, if your displays are excellent, you probably are a little bit behind with your marking. And if your,
teaching input is absolutely perfect and you probably haven't had time to really research the latest education policy.
It's always been a case of balance, but I think it's never, ever been more important to do that as a school leader.

Catherine: And I guess, one of the tricky things I see in my role. So my back story isn't classroom practice. I cut my teeth in program management and procurement and commissioning. And those are skills learned over long periods of time, and I sometimes recoil a little bit.
If I'm in a meeting and I hear a head talking about having conversations with suppliers to save money off contracts, because I think that can take you so far.
But inevitably we end up in a race to the bottom. And I think I see that education is an ecosystem and we need great suppliers bringing great services to schools because, as we said in the intro, heads can't possibly know everything there is to know about commissioning, about budgets.
You know, we need specialists around us and it's great if you're a larger school and you can afford a business manager, but not all heads can do that.
So it strikes me we're now in this world of needing to do things differently, and perhaps switch up those conversations with suppliers away from, you know, you need to save money off to, how can we do things differently.
And I think for me, that's an outcomes led discussion. How do you see that, Carol?

Carole: I think you're right. And I think it's getting ever more important to stop trying...we used to call it salami slicing, where you have a look at your budget and in CPD used to be £400 in your budget for each department last year, now I'm going to make it £350.
I don't think that works. I don't think it probably ever worked, but trying to retrofit now your education strategy against your financial priorities is really, really difficult.
So, prior to coming back to HFL, I worked in a trust and the trust, most of the schools at the time were in massive financial deficit, and the way we approached it was absolutely not salami slicing because they were also in educational crisis to, some of them.
And it was really important for us to actually do what we called bottom up budgeting. But starting from the very beginning, throwing out what we've done before and said in this community, what is it that we really have to do? What are the priorities educationally and how will that show itself in the budget? So we started really with where we were trying to get to and then fitted the budget around that, and that included everything from people to resources.
But I think sometimes that the speed of life means that you end up doing incremental budgeting and it can't work. It doesn't take you where you need to go. So again, it's nothing new, but having your educational vision lead everything and make sure that you are being a responsible financial steward - you do have to do that too.
And you know, we're going to have a separate conversation about juxtapositions in education. It really makes me sad that we talk about finance separately to education a lot of the time.
And Ofsted do that.
I'm probably really unpopular at this point, but the fact that Ofsted can come in and look at you and judge you solely on educational outcomes means that the false imperative there is to prioritise that and not worry about the long term future.
So I've seen schools where they have been made to be educationally brilliant, but it's all built on sand. That head collects the educational outcomes, collects the Ofsted inspection results and then leaves and the school is left in chaos for the next 15 years because the next head or trust leader cannot do anything, they've got no money.
And it really is a balance.
It's something that, again, as a leader, you've got to be really brave about and have to say these are my priorities and I'm going to make an educated decision to leave things for now and build them into the plan for two, three, four years. You do need a longer term plan because you need to make sure if we are parking something, we'll come back and get it in the next 2 or 3 years.
But salami slicing is never the way and it just doesn't work anymore. It's a lot harder work to go back to the beginning, but it's always more important.

Catherine: A lot of what you've talked about, absolutely resonates  with me.
I remember a head once saying to me 'show me a head that's been sacked for going into deficit, because I'll show you plenty that have been sacked for taking their schools into inadequate.'
And that was so true and really difficult to hear.
But that is the reality that, you know, standards, and rightly so, we want the very best for children and young people, but also today's, deficit is tomorrow's cut. And we are stewards in this system aren't we.

Carole: For me, that's an ethical point too. We are stewards of the system. And just as it's really, really important to provide the children with the very best education today. I think it's really remiss to not worry about the next generation.
And we used to talk about that a lot in my trust. These year three's today will never, ever get this other chance. That's right. But I've got reception kids are going to arrive in year three in a few years time, and they're absolutely going to deserve the same thing these children deserve now.
And that, again, is a really important conversation to have at system leadership level, even if you can do really well in Ofsted by taking the school into bankruptcy, it's not a long term strategic position that holds up in the light of ethics, because somehow the next generation of children will suffer.
And again, we've seen that before. It's a really important balance because you can't lower your educational standards in order to create financial balance either. That's the wrong answer, too, because that will take you to chaos if you prioritise the budget, and then you do really badly in terms of outcomes, expectations, community reputation and inspection outcomes, then actually you're going to come a cropper  at some point, the parents will find out you'll have fewer children wanting to come into your school, or you'll have a difficult Ofsted and again, that leads to fewer children in your school. That means your finances get worse too. So if you try and prioritise finance over education, that's also a path to destruction, because at some point you'll accelerate your own financial decline by not being a good school. It's got to be about balance, but I'm afraid that always takes me back to vision, values and shared bottom up budgeting.
You have to forget what worked before because that's irrelevant what worked before. Let's have a look at what we need to do for the future and build around that.

Catherine: And I absolutely agree that at the end of the day, a quart can't physically fit into a pint pot. And I think,
you know, you and I have lots of conversations, around the executive team with, with our colleagues about
at that stage, it's about doing things differently, and rethinking how you're doing things.
And that can be really challenging, not least in an organisation because of the change management and the culture eating the strategy for breakfast.
How can schools work with suppliers to do things differently?
I mean, obviously you can control the controllables school, but organizations like HFL, how are we rethinking services, Carol? I guess our costs are going up and up and up. And, you know, it's the same scenario. And I think, you know, we can all join this race at the bottom together or we can switch things up. So how are we approaching this?

Carole: Well, we're approaching it in much the same way as we did in the trust and as we previously did in HFL, by stop looking at the individual problems. And again, going back to the beginning, where is it we're trying to get, what are the really important things to us and are there other ways of working. I think the big mistake that you can make in any organisation, whether that be a trust or in HFL, is to specify to a supplier how you want them to do things.

Catherine: Absolutely. Yeah.

Carole: If you go in to a supplier and say, I think it's really, really important that it has a green button, that it goes...if you're describing your current process, you might get a bit off the price, but what you really have to do is go with them with a problem like a partner. And so this is what I am trying to fix. What is the best way of doing it?
So we did the same with catering in the trust. If I go to the trust and then back to HFL. In the trust we went to procure catering but instead of describing what we wanted and how the service must be run and how they must have that people and what kind of training they must provide, we described what good look like as an outcome for us.
And again, it was a balance. We were not by any means flush. We were a financially challenged trust. But for me, it was a step too far to provide the children with rubbish food because we needed really strong outcomes. So we started with the children must get the best possible meal and it must be affordable to parents. Can you go away and tell us what that looks like?
And we actually had somebody go out and get quotes for it on that basis. And it's really important you start there with a problem. So in HFL we've recently done that. We're re-procuring our CPD solution, how we deliver training to schools. It's really easy, and we default to it by accident, to describe the process we need it to meet.
So our finance team must have this output, our teams must be able to put courses in like this. If you do that, you're going to get a really expensive bespoke system. You have to go with it...our CPD offer,  it's been very much about must be easy to access for people. They must be able to access training by credit cards or by invoice, either of which is fine by us.
And you must be able to have a certain number of delegates. We've started with the solution we're trying to find in terms of a system in outputs, not by process. And I think it's kind of a controlling nature, I get why we do it, but it always leads to bad purchasing decisions.
It's really important to find partners that you can describe your situation, describe what the outcome would look like and move towards that.
And my background was, I was a NOF trainer for people old enough in this podcast to even know what that is, my background is in educational I.T. And that's not a new way of doing it. IT procurement always goes really badly. If you start with I want 30 iPads. That was the thing back in the day. People used to ring me and say I've bought 30 iPads what should I do? It's the wrong way round. What do you want? You can still do a teaching and learning spec for it in your school.
What must the children be able to do? What must the adults be able to do? Now you find me a technological solution that matches it. And if, I mean it with love, but if people like me who are not technically savvy try to define to find the technical route, it's going to be wrong. It's going to be expensive, and it's probably going to be outdated. It's going to be the way you used to do it, not the way you could do it.
So in HFL we're going to save something like £180,000 off our cost base this year by swapping finance systems and a CPD delivery system, by moving with the times and updating to a cloud based system.
I don't get it, and I kind of don't need to, I just need to know it's going to deliver what it delivers for us in terms of our way of interacting with the world.
So we've got really strong partners on both of those contracts. But that's significant and if I try to go back to our old finance system provider and say, can we have 10% off because we're really good customer and we've been with you five years, they might have done it, but it wouldn't of take me to that paradigm shifting.
For us that's huge. We're not for profit, to be able to shave that off of our cost base is absolutely huge. And it was the same with catering in the trust. And it was the same MIS in the trust. You have to be prepared to shift routes, but the first step is finding a good partner.

Catherine: I think what I've heard Carol today is it's about balance, balancing education outcomes and financial sustainability. It's about being brave and doing things differently and being prepared to think outside the box sometimes. Is there sort of a final sort of hint or tip you would give to school leaders that are grappling with how to do more with less.

Carole: I would also say it's about holding on to what you think is important for your community. If you try and talk to other people, they'll give you ideas. But it goes back to local leadership Catherine. You can't turn to somebody else and say, what's your structure in a one form entry school? And then give you a perfect answer, because they haven't got your children and they haven't got your staff.
So again, in other school situations, sometimes shared headship has worked for us and it's been a really strong system. But then you have to take into account how strong is the deputy, what's the school business structure? You can't just take a kind of cut and paste, an Ikea based solution and transpose it. You have to have faith in your own leadership, your knowledge of your community, and your knowledge of what really matters at the end of the day.
And so I do think you need to find a partner, but you need to absolutely have faith in, you know what good looks like for your area. And it's easy to be diverted by that to be sold snake oil, to be told that somebody else knows a better solution. You do have to be open to the 'how' being different but the vision, the why has to be rooted in your local knowledge and your confidence as a leader, that you will be a responsible steward and do the right thing for the people in your care. And I think that balance and that confidence is really important, but it doesn't mean you have to fake technical knowledge in areas you know nothing about.
I'm really confident about the fact I don't understand the cloud finance system. I don't need to and I'm prepared to take a bit of a risk with it because the people who were involved in the journey, I trust our partners. I trust our internal finance team. And the brief has been be brave, think differently. Don't just try and shave. I think shaving is dangerous for so many reasons Catherine. It is about stopping sometimes.

Catherine: It's a great analogy, isn't it? You shave, sometimes you cut yourself.
Brilliant Carol so in conclusion, it's about balance, it's about being brave with your partners but above all else, it's about context and actually backing yourself as a leader.

Carole: I think the last thing Catherine is going to be believing it could be different. I think that it's really important to know that the world may have changed and the thing you did before might not actually be the right thing anymore. The people have change in your institution. The children have changed in your institution. And actually technology changes too. Stopping and just checking whether there is a better option is really important. And sometimes there isn't. And that's fine, because actually gives you peace when you go to bed at night - I had a look, there was nothing better, I'll move on, I'll look somewhere else. But I go back to those massive savings we've achieved here in HFL that means we can be a better value provider elsewhere.
I didn't think we'd find them at the start of the day but you find a partner, you ask around, you check your solution, you know what the end looks like, and sometimes you surprise yourself with what you can do but it's only possible if you stop and check.

Catherine: Well, Carol, that has been the most sort of interesting and inspiring conversation so, thank you for your time.
I hope you've enjoyed listening and whatever platform you have accessed us on.
If you enjoyed this podcast, please don't forget to like it and subscribe and if you've got any questions for Carol, I just pop them in the chat and we'd be delighted to answer them.
Thank you. Bye bye.