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School business management primary partnerships

During the 2010-11 financial year we worked with the DfE to introduce SBM primary partnerships with the aim of increasing access to skilled school business managers within the primary sector. We issued grants to 189 clusters of schools across every government region and 100 local authorities.

All of the grant funding for this initiative has now been allocated, but we are hoping to secure additional funding for the 2011-12 financial year. All bids that were received following the allocation of funding have been placed on a waiting list. You will have been notified if your bid is on this list. A list of the lead schools of the clusters who were awarded grant funding is available below:

We received some initial feedback from the schools involved on the impact that their SBMs have had working across the partnership. Although these individuals have only been working across several schools for a short time the impact they are having is extremely positive. We are in the process of collating the data we have received and this will be made available here in due course.

Background to primary partnerships

There is clear and compelling evidence that appropriately skilled and effectively deployed school business managers (SBMs) can save around a third of their headteacher’s time and five per cent of their school’s resources.

However, whilst 90 per cent of secondary schools have a school business manager, less than a third of schools have access to an SBM in the primary sector. We know that the skills of school business managers will be sorely needed over the coming years to effectively manage resources as financial resources tighten.

Tools that will help support your clustering arrangements:

School business management partnership advisers are no longer funded to provide peer-to-peer support for primary partnership projects. Case studies and information about past projects can be found in the SBM development guide.

This project was developed out of the work of several demonstration projects examining the impact that SBMs have in schools.