Your Timetable Is A Budget: The DfE's 1:19 Staffing Ratio

This is the education commute. I want you to picture the school timetable. Okay, like the one that's probably pinned to the staff room wall right now. Yeah, exactly. Or, you know, maybe it's just that PDF that absolutely everybody has bookmarked on their computer. Right. We look at it every single day, right? And we treat it like this, um... educational map well yeah because it tells us where everyone's supposed to be right but it isn't i really want to put it to you that this document is not actually a curriculum document at all wait really so what are you saying it is then it is a multi -million pound spending plan i mean when you look at that timetable grid every single period on it is a person being paid to be in a room oh wow i mean when you put it like that right if you change just one line of it you have um you've altered the entire budget and yet Most of the people who argue about the timetable have never once been shown what a single line actually costs.

You know, that completely changes the perspective. Because if you're a middle leader listening to this, you're probably used to just looking at your own department's allocation on that grid. Exactly. And to set up our roles for this exploration, I want you to take the chair of the person who actually has to propose a school budget to a governing body in the spring. Okay, I can do that. Yeah. And I guess you're taking the role of a middle leader. Like someone who asks for things. Yep, I am.

I'm the one, you know, knocking on your door asking for another set or an extra technician or maybe to keep that small option group of 11 students running for just another year. Right, okay. And I need to state right at the top, just from the perspective of that middle leader role, I have never once been told what any of my requests actually cost. Yeah, it's pretty common. I mean, I just ask for the resources because I know my students need them. I don't ever see the bank account.

Which gives us the entire map for this episode, really. We're going to examine how that timetable actually functions as a financial document. Okay, so how do we break that down? We're looking at three fundamental pillars. The duty, meaning, you know, what kind of money this actually is. Then the method, the specific process the Department for Education says a school should use. And finally, the check, like who you actually have to explain all of this to. All right. So before we even look at the math or the method or whatever, we have to settle the most fundamental question, right?

Whose money is this? Yes, this is pillar one. The duty. And it's the question that trips up so many staff room conversations. How so? Well, if you ask someone whose money it is, they'll usually say it's the school's money or they'll say it's the head's money or the trust's money. Or even that their departmental budget is their own money. I mean, as a middle leader, if I'm allocated a certain amount, it definitely feels like my money. I plan for it. I spend it. I feel ownership over it.

Totally understandable. But it isn't any of those things. It's not the school's property and it's not the head's property. I want to look directly at the Department for Education's own framework here. Okay, let's hear it. We're going to look at Statement 7 .5. And this is a sentence I truly believe should be printed on the front of every single budget paper a school produces. I'm going to read it exactly. Go for it. Schools are public bodies and so have a duty to use all public money in the public interest.

Right. So if we break that down, schools are public bodies. They're using public money. Yes. And the ultimate test for how it's spent is simply the public interest. It's not our property to do with as we please. It's held in trust. Precisely. It is public money held in trust. And once we establish that, we have to look at the rules governing how we actually hold it. Which brings us to another part of the framework. Yeah. Statement 7 .6. The framework is very clear that funding mechanisms differ depending on the type of school.

It states, and I will read this exactly, each mechanism has different financial regulations associated with it. Ah. Which perfectly explains why every single finance conversation in education always starts with somebody saying, well, it depends. Because a rule or a regulation that binds a maintained school might not bind an academy and vice versa. Exactly. The honest answer to what are the rules on this always has to begin with determining exactly what kind of school you're in. That makes sense. The framework acknowledges that reality plainly. But regardless of those specific regulations, it actually puts the whole cycle of management into one single line.

This is statement 7 .4. Okay. I'll read it exactly. Good financial, human, and educational resource management, strategic planning, employee relations, and risk management are the foundations of a good school. Wait. I mean, that sounds great in a PDF, but... Strategic planning usually just feels like an administrative headache to me as a middle leader. Oh, I'm sure it does. I just want to teach my subject and support my staff. How is all of that considered a foundation? Because without it, the school just cannot function. It's not just administrative background noise.

How you manage your finances and your human resources dictates whether you can actually put teachers in front of students. Right. OK. And there is one more statement in this first pillar that I think should fundamentally change how a leadership team talks when those resource requests actually come in. Which statement is that? This is statement 7 .K. It asks the leader to consider, reading exactly, the opportunity cost of any allocation decision. Opportunity cost. Okay, if we take that out of the framework and apply it directly to the staff room, what does that actually mean when I knock on your door and ask for a technician?

It means that asking, can we afford it, is entirely the wrong question. Why? I mean, if I need a technician, surely the only thing that matters is whether there's enough money to pay for one. Well, because almost always the answer to can we afford it in isolation is yes. A school budget is large enough that any single item on its own is affordable. Right, I see. But the money is finite. And more importantly... It's already committed to something else. Yeah, because the money isn't just sitting in a vault waiting to be claimed.

It's already deployed across that timetable. Exactly. You are asking to stop paying for one thing in order to start paying for a technician. So the question isn't whether there's a technician's worth of money sitting in a bank account. It's what the technician is instead of. Yes. What is the opportunity cost? And notice that the framework simply asks the leader to consider that opportunity cost. It does not tell the leader to automatically say no. It just demands that the reality of the choice is acknowledged. So if we distill pillar one.

It's public money held in trust. The financial rules depend entirely on what kind of school you are. And every single time you say yes to a request, it's a no to something else that you should be able to explicitly name. Which forces us to ask, if every decision is a tradeoff, how on earth do we actually make those choices systematically? Right. Which brings us to pillar two. Yeah. The method. Yes. And this is where things get really fascinating because the Department for Education actually has a named method for doing this.

Wait, a specifically named method for planning the timetable and the budget together. Yes, and the framework points directly at it. If you look at Statement 7 .J, it states that there must be, reading exactly, a strong connection between strategic decisions and the associated resource implications. Okay. And then it provides an example in brackets right there in the text, reading exactly again, using integrated curriculum and financial planning to ensure that the timetable delivers the school's curriculum priorities within the available budget. Integrated curriculum and financial planning. Yes.

The Department for Education has a specific public guidance document dedicated entirely to this. It was written by Sam Ellis and Susan Fielden. It was published in August 2019, and it's titled Basic Principles of Integrated Curriculum and Financial Planning. Oh, okay. Is it super dense? Not at all. It's incredibly accessible. It's just 10 pages long, and it's completely free. And in its very first line, it states exactly who the document is for. Who is it for? It's for senior staff, governors in any type of school or academy trust and trust board members.

So this isn't some hidden, impenetrable accountant's manual. This is a 10 -page document that a governor is fully expected to be able to read, understand, and use. Which means it's entirely fair for a governor to walk into a meeting and ask detailed questions about it. Yeah, definitely. The guidance gives a very careful, specific definition of what this method actually is. It defines it as reading exactly. A process with associated metrics through which a school or mat can seek to deliver the best curriculum it can within the context of available resources.

Right. And crucially, it also notes that the curriculum reading exactly must be broad and balanced. You know, that phrasing is vital for someone in my position. It proves this is not just a blunt cost cutting tool designed to strip everything away. It explicitly states the curriculum must remain broad and balanced. It is absolutely not just a cost cutting tool. And the guidance goes out of its way to emphasize this point. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Reading. Exactly. Integrated curriculum and financial planning is a process for planning with associated metrics.

It is not just a set of metrics. I am so glad it makes that distinction because usually when this kind of planning arrives in schools, it doesn't feel like a process. It just arrives at my desk as a massive spreadsheet full of ratios that I am told I have to meet. And the guidance anticipates exactly that negative reaction. Its final paragraph issues a very clear warning about relying too heavily on spreadsheets and numbers without the human process. Read the warning exactly. A risk is that it is easy to extract too many statistics and charts which can obscure rather than clarify the situation.

That is a phenomenal warning. Too many statistics obscure rather than clarify. Exactly. So if it's a process and not just a wall of charts, what does this structured argument actually look like? What's the core mechanism of this 10 -page document? The core mechanism is about reconciling two dimensions that never naturally match. On one side, you have the curriculum perspective. This side works out exactly how many teachers the curriculum you want to run actually requires. On the other side, you have the finance perspective. This side works out exactly how many teachers you can actually afford to employ.

This guidance puts it reading exactly. The aim is to reconcile the estimate of the number of teachers required from a curriculum perspective with the number the school estimates it can afford to employ from a finance perspective. So the entire exercise is essentially a structured, formalized argument between the teachers required and the teachers affordable. Exactly. The curriculum says we need this many humans in rooms, and the budget says we can only pay for this many humans. And this process forces those two numbers to face each other.

That is the exact mechanism. And to figure out the curriculum side, to calculate the teachers required, the minimum information required by the guidance is incredibly brief. Oh, really? Yeah, there are only four pieces of information needed, and every single school already has them. They are the total amount of teacher time used in the current timetable. the pupil role, the total number of full -time equivalent teachers, and the length of the timetable cycle. Just those four things? Just those four. And from those four existing figures, you can derive the two key curriculum statistics that the guidance names, the contact ratio, and the average class size.

Let's explain that mechanism because it sounds a bit more complicated than it actually is. Sure. If you know your total teacher time being used across the school and you divide it by your full -time equivalent teachers, You instantly reveal the contact ratio. You suddenly see the exact proportion of the timetable your staff is actually spending in front of students versus doing other things. Exactly. And the same simplicity applies to the finance side. The minimum list of information needed to figure out how many teachers you can afford is just as short.

What's on that side? It includes the total available revenue, pupil numbers, the in -year balance, the cumulative balance, full -time equivalence and total cost by staff line, and total non -staff expenditure. Okay, but this is where I had to push back as the middle leader. What are the actual targets? What do you mean? Because every time a framework or a spreadsheet like this comes around, somebody somewhere throws out a golden ratio. They say we must have one teacher to 19 kids. Does this guidance document actually...

mandate a specific number that we have to hit? Well, it does give some numbers, but they are incredibly carefully hedged. And this is where people get it wrong. I want to read this and I want to make sure I date it properly, just as the text does. OK, let's hear it. In paragraph 28, the document states a school can set an upper limit on teacher numbers. And it gives an example. I will quote this exactly. Using ratios of 1 to 21 in primary, 1 to 19 in key stages 3 and 4, and 1 to 12 in post -16 would put most schools in the region of the national averages shown for November 2018.

November 2018. Yes, November 2018. Remember, the guidance itself was published in August 2019. These ratios are simply illustrative reference points from that specific historical time. So they aren't targets at all. They are emphatically not targets. And the document immediately clarifies this point in the very next sentence, reading exactly. Different ratios would set a different FTE as the school saw fit. You know, it is so crucial that you read that exactly as it's written, because it would be the easiest thing in the world for someone holding the budget to just point at you and repeat 1 to 19 as if it were a hard, unyielding rule from the Department for Education.

Yeah, it is regularly misquoted. It is an illustration, not a mandate. The guidance also spends time discussing the future, specifically projections. It suggests projecting three to five years ahead. And it's very direct about the fact that the biggest variable in all of this planning is the projected pupil role, because unplanned growth can be just as difficult and chaotic to manage financially as a falling role. That makes total sense. Therefore, it suggests planning three distinct scenarios. Most optimistic, most likely, and most pessimistic. So if we pull the so what out of pillar two.

The timetable and the budget are fundamentally the same document. The Department for Education provides a free, 10 -page named method called Integrated Curriculum and Financial Planning to handle this reconciliation. Yes. And it only requires four basic pieces of curriculum information that schools already have on hand to get started. Which brings us to Pillar 3, the check. This is about accountability. If you are following this method and you're holding this public money in trust, who are you actually accountable to and who do you have to explain your decisions to?

This is where we're looking at the governing body. Yes. The framework connects this entire cycle of curriculum and financial planning to accountability very, very clearly. We are looking at Statement 10 .3. What does it say? I'll read it exactly. School leaders are accountable for their decisions and actions and must submit themselves to the scrutiny necessary to ensure this. That language aligned almost word for word with the Nolan accountability principle. It's the exact same principle. Leaders must submit to scrutiny. And Statement 10 .E backs this up by expecting adherence to the principles of public life, reading exactly, at all times.

Right. And what about the structures themselves? As for the structural governance arrangements themselves, Statement 10 .2 notes that different school structures have different governance and accountability arrangements, and each of those has their own specific regulations. It specifically names the governance handbook and, where appropriate, the academy's financial handbook. Statement 10 .B expects headteachers to apply a good understanding of these frameworks to their own local policies. Okay, so the headteacher and the leaders have to submit to scrutiny from the governors. But what does that scrutiny actually look like in practice when it comes to presenting the numbers?

That is covered by Statement 10 .C. I'll read it exactly. Ensure that formal papers that are prepared and presented are clear, concise, and accurate. Clear, concise, and accurate. I have to say... Having seen a few in my time, budget papers are rarely all three of those things. No. And they're almost never concise. They often aren't. But that is the explicit expectation. And the final piece of the framework in this pillar is Statement 7 .0, which asks leaders to propose reading exactly a prudent budget to those responsible for governance.

Here is my ultimate challenge with this entire third pillar. Everything we just discussed, the scrutiny, the clear papers, the prudent budget, it's entirely about the relationship between the leader and the governors. Yes. Where is the part that helps me? Where is the part that helps the middle leader asking for the technician or the option group? Because looking at this, there is absolutely no right here for me to see those numbers. You know, you are absolutely right. And I can see that plainly. Nothing in the cycle, nothing in the framework gives the person asking for resources the right to see the numbers.

Transparency downward is entirely optional. But I would argue that choosing transparency is the cheapest thing in this entire episode. Think about it. If you as a middle leader. actually knew the true financial cost of one teaching period on that timetable, those bidding conversations would completely change shape without anyone ever needing to be told no. Let us translate that into reality. Let us transition to what this actually looks like in practice. Let's look at three rooms, three different educational settings where this concept that the timetable is a spending plan suddenly becomes intensely real.

Good idea. First room, primary. Here, the conversation about the contact ratio we discussed earlier often revolves heavily around who is covering planning, preparation, and assessment time, or PPA. Right, yeah. You generally have a choice. You can use a specialist teacher, you can use cover supervision, or you can use a leader's release time. And that choice is obviously a curriculum decision regarding quality and provision, but it is simultaneously a major financial decision. Exactly. Applying the method we just outlined looks like the leadership team writing down the precise financial cost next to each of those three options before anyone in the room starts arguing about which choice is best.

Because if you don't write the cost down, you're just arguing about curriculum in a financial vacuum. Yeah. So, second room. Secondary. In a secondary setting, you might have a department asking to keep a small option group running. Maybe it only has 11 students. Using what we have discussed today, the response to that request shouldn't just be a simple yes or no. What should it be? You answer with the opportunity cost. This is framework 7 .K, actively applied. You sit down and say, keeping this group requires this many teacher periods, which equals this many periods somewhere else.

Right. You make the financial reality of that small group clear, and you make the decision in the open. In the third room, a specialist setting. In a specialist setting, staffing is fundamentally driven by the specific needs of the pupils, not by standard generic class sizes. Therefore, applying the mainstream ratios like the 1 to 19 we discussed earlier is completely meaningless. Oh, entirely meaningless, yeah. The guidance document itself states that approaches must fit a school's own context. So for a specialist setting, applying this process looks like building a custom reference metric based entirely on the adults that an agreed level of need actually requires.

Okay. And then holding that custom metric against the budget in the exact same two -dimensional way. It's still teachers required versus teachers affordable, but the required number is built on your specific context. So if we return to that artifact. Yeah. We return to the timetable pinned to the staff room wall. We look at that exact same grid with the exact same names in the exact same boxes. But now you know the cost of just one line on that grid. You know how many teachers the curriculum actually needs.

You know how many the budget can actually afford. And crucially, the gap between those two numbers is written down somewhere for a governor to clearly see and scrutinize. And when I come to your office to ask for that extra technician. You get answered with what it's instead of. And that entirely replaces the phrase there's no money. Because saying there's no money is never actually true and everybody in the building knows it. That brings us to the staff room seat. Yes, the staff room seat. Next time you are at break, ask whoever is standing nearest the kettle to guess the cost of just one teaching period a week for an entire year.

Just ask for a simple guess. And notice that nobody in the room actually knows the answer. Exactly. So the walk -in scenario for the listener. If a governor walked into your school tomorrow morning and asked how the timetable was reconciled with the budget, is there a formal document that shows the gap between teachers needed and teachers affordable? The method is published, the indicators are clearly named, and the first version of it relies on four figures the school already has. So four things that take off the drive.

We'll alternate summarizing these four exact points. Number one. Public money. Schools are public bodies with a duty to use public money in the public interest. The financial regulations depend entirely on the school type. Number two, opportunity cost. Every single allocation decision has an opportunity cost. Asking, can we afford it, is the wrong question. Asking, what is it instead of, is the right one. Number three, the method. Integrated curriculum and financial planning is a free 10 -page method published by the Department for Education. It requires four existing figures, teacher time, the role, full -time equivalent teachers, and the cycle length to give you the contact ratio and average class size.

Number four, process, not ratios. It is a process. Too many statistics obscure rather than clarify. The November 2018 ratios are illustrative reference points, not targets, and leaders must submit themselves to the necessary scrutiny. A reminder that the framework and the planning guidance are both linked in the show notes and they're free to open. Read them. We're the trailer. trip in. See you at the gates.