Concordia 27_cover section.indd

Concordia Winter 2024

should simply absorb the VAT. However, if I were to cast around for cuts in order to pass the savings on to parents, I must do so within a small percentage of the overall school budget. I would have to make very deep cuts in this discretionary spending for it to have any significant impact on the overall budget. The students would notice the difference. Schools are not factories; teachers are not assembly-line workers. An efficient manufacturing process will produce an acceptable product at the smallest cost. If factory A can make a passable widget 50% more cheaply than factory B, then factory B will

School leaders are constrained in their provision of good value by the ways school finances are structured. Most of school expenditure goes on fixed costs. Of those fixed costs, the great majority is spent on staff salaries. The percentage will vary between schools but will be usually somewhere between 60% and 80% of expenditure. State schools will tend to be at the higher end of this range. In addition to staff salaries, there are other fixed costs. These include the maintenance of grounds or playing fields, regular refurbishment of buildings, the regular upgrade of IT resources and any contracts that the school has signed. The government has blithely said that schools

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“At present Merchant Taylors’ is hugely oversubscribed and continues to grow in popularity. A recent survey of parental opinion made it clear that the school is considered ‘good value for money’ — a pleasing outcome, as we live or die by that assessment.”