£25k grants for academy trusts to employ SBMs

The Education Funding Agency has said it will make £25k grants available 'for small groups of schools, consisting mainly of primaries, to collaborate to employ a School Business Manager in a leadership role. This match-funded grant of £25,000 is for the financial year 2014 to 2015.'



It said it would invite applications for the grant within the next month and will release more information once the process is finalised. For further summary information before the grant is launched, and to be added to the mailing list, please email sbm.grant@education.gsi.gov.uk

Academy heads did not disclose what percentage of their time is taken up by financial matters in the DfE's workload survey. The proportion of time spent by heads of both primary and secondary non-academies was around 12%. This workload is likely to be higher for academy heads without SBMs.

Stephen Morales, Executive Director of NASBM said: Heads should be engaging in finance but never to the detriment on Teaching and Learning and always with the support of a trained professional SBM, FD or equivalent - as a percentage of their time it is very difficult to quantify and will be dependent on context.