Managing Scarce Resources
What We Do
- We can provide support to help your school to operate in a more environmentally and financially sustainable manner.
- Our team has the expertise to help you achieve the efficiency savings associated with sustainable behaviour.
- We can help develop processes that ensure that you can both monitor and measure the success of the services you have procured.
- We can help you to develop innovative tools to monitor risks and mitigate against poor performance.
Our Beliefs
Environmental and economic sustainability have become important considerations for many schools when purchasing external services. This has manifested itself in a growing awareness of the need to commit to the principles of buying sustainable products and services, using technologies to cut down wasteful additional expenditure and monitoring the efficient use of energy, water and consumables. The goal of many headteachers and governors is to achieve significant budget efficiencies and better performance from external service providers. This can be achieved whilst at the same time allowing the school to play its part in protecting the environment.
Our Services
Many head teachers recognise that they have managers and governors who have experienced nearly two decades of growth in education budgets and so have never managed in a time of stand-still or diminishing budgets and do not feel confident in taking the certain actions.
Our specialist advisers will help school leaders and governors by:- Improving awareness of where and how greater efficiencies can be achieved.
- Providing tools that increase management capacity to procure and commission services more effectively.
- Developing processes to manage resources more robustly through improved contract monitoring and quality assurance measures.
- Developing systems that allow the delegation of responsibilities for monitoring and evaluating contract performance to the wider leadership team, business managers and governors.
- Changing the culture of management teams towards procurement so that there is greater innovation and more collaboration around purchasing.
Managing Scarce Resources Is Not About Cuts
Achieving value for money should be a priority for school leaders and governors regardless of the prevailing economic conditions as it both allows more resources to be targeted at teaching and learning and is environmentally sustainable.
- Reduce costs through better procurement and commissioning whilst achieving the same outputs
- Reduce inputs such as energy and materials but get the same or better outputs
- Get greater outputs with improved quality from service providers for the same inputs
- Get proportionally more outputs or improved quality for a small increase in expenditure.
