Staffing accounts for roughly 85% of most school budget expenditure, sometimes more, leaving 15% of a school budget to cover the rest of the costs of running a successful school. This being the case, it is imperative that finance teams play their part in maximising the impact of the investment schools make in their teaching staff.
The status quo
It is right that School Business Managers, Finance Directors, and other finance team members make sure that they are getting best value from the 15% of budgets spent on resources and infrastructure. This does have a crucial impact on the school’s ability to function and deliver outstanding teaching and learning on a daily basis.
Traditionally, the hiring of teaching staff and ensuring best value from the school staffing budget, is in the hands of Heads of Department, Deputy Heads, Headteachers, and Governors. So how can finance teams impact best value from the lions share of a school budget when they are not in control of hiring and firing teaching staff?
The answer is Sparkjar
Sparkjar is The Realtime Teaching Platform. Designed to create a safe, organised digital space for teachers to teach, our schools have discovered tangible savings and recognise that Sparkjar gives them best value from their financial investment in their teachers.
Through our research with our customers, we have conservatively calculated that Sparkjar saves each teacher an average of 3 hours a week – that’s 10 working days over the course of an academic year. By using technology to shave valuable minutes off repetitive admin tasks, we are having a real impact on the value our schools are seeing from their teachers and knock on savings from reduced cover and recruitment costs.
Lets do the maths
The average teacher salary in the UK is £28,466 (source: https://www.reed.co.uk/average-salary/average-teacher-salary) .
With employer costs added the actual average cost for a school is £32,000.
Divide that by a 39 week academic year gives you £821.
Divide this by a 40 hour working week gives you a cost of £21 per hour on average for each teacher.
So, with an average time saving of 3 hours per week for teachers using Sparkjar, we can confidently say that the tangible cost impact per teacher across an academic year is
(3 hours x £21) x 39 weeks = £2,457
Extrapolate that across all your teaching staff and you are seeing serious added value from your school budget investment in your teachers.
We would be happy to share more detailed information on how Sparkjar finds these time and cost savings. You can book a call with one of our pre-sales team here.
