Anchored in the community

Top takeaways

• See your trust as a community anchor. You’re leading a civic institution with a shared responsibility for children’s success. Build strong local partnerships that link education with health, social care, and employers.
  
• Tackle the root causes of absence and underachievement. Work with families and local services to understand barriers – poverty, hunger, mental health – and remove them together.
  
• Collaborate across trusts and sectors. Don’t let organisational boundaries get in the way. Look into models like the Reach Foundation’s Cradle-to-Career approach to create joined-up, place-based solutions.
  
• Equip business professionals for change. The SBP role is becoming more strategic and vital than ever. Invest in professional development, support networks, and protected time to grow leadership and technical expertise.
• Embrace tech – and plan for it. AI and digital tools can save time and streamline systems, but only with clear strategy, investment, and training.

Benedicte Yue is Chief Financial Officer at River Learning Trust, an ISBL fellow and trustee. This is an extract from our longer conversation, 'Keep sight of your North Star: navigating the school business landscape'. It follows on from the blog post Values, impact and agency: lessons learned in operational leadership.

An opportunity to make a difference 

Making a difference for the community: this is really my thing about trusts. One in five pupils is persistently absent. 300,000 children in England are missing education and there is almost a two year gap for disadvantaged children by the end of their secondary education. Over 4 million children are living in poverty, 1 million in destitution.

This is not acceptable. And you can have the best teachers in schools, but if some children have their bucket full even before they start learning – for example, if they have not been able to sleep properly, to eat, or have mental health issues due to a difficult family situation – this is going to be more difficult.

Therefore it’s very important to try and tackle the root cause and support families. But this does go well beyond the school gates. It needs to be a joined-up effort across education, local government, civil society, and employers as well. 

So as a large employer with the longest relationship with our families – because schools can have several children from the age of five to 16 or 18 – we have a responsibility to facilitate this collaboration locally as an anchor institution. 

Cradle to career

The Reach Foundation is generously sharing their framework to get started on what they call the Cradle-to-Career model. My trust is currently working with United Learning to set up a community hub in Oxford, in one of our disadvantaged areas. I'm really excited about this; I've just done my community asset map. There are quite a few hubs around the country already. I would really encourage readers to have a look on the Reach Foundation’s Cradle-to-Career website and see if they could join an existing network or get support to set one up if their area is not already covered.

I think the complexity of today's challenges demands joined-up solutions. We should not expect everything to be fixed from the top, and the most effective partnerships are shaped locally, so schools are really civic institutions with a collective responsibility for the success of the children in their community.

And we should probably rethink accountability to recognise and reward the value of collaborative working and share the impact. 

Trusts as anchor institutions

For me, trusts as anchor institutions means you really try to understand your wider community, and how you need to work with all the other civic actors. For example, I've just done a community asset mapping exercise to try and understand all the socioeconomic indicators, who are all the players in the area? How could we have a more joined-up approach, from the very early years with health visitors through to social workers to support the families in things like nutrition, up to the career side of things, really to build links with employers? So it's really being anchored in your community.

I wish multi-academy trusts would have been commissioned in a more geographically coherent way in the first place, it would've really helped, but it doesn't really matter. We can still work together in our communities, regardless of which trust you belong to. It's all about local area partnerships.

Understanding root causes and removing barriers

We shouldn't lose sight of our core purpose, which is teaching and learning. But I think we wouldn’t get very far if we didn’t tackle the root causes.

For example, fining parents for attendance. We know the research is showing that it is deteriorating the relationship and not necessarily an effective method. So you really need to understand why the children are not coming to school and you don't do it alone. You need to build partnerships.

So obviously schools don't necessarily have the resources, but it's really working together locally to understand the root cause and your families. The families spend far more time with their kids than school. So I think when you can extend that relationship and support the families, they can really enhance the learning as well.

But unfortunately, in some areas there are so many barriers to learning that we need to help them address where we can, to remove those barriers. 

Thriving in a challenging and changing landscape

It's certainly a tough time for our school business professionals; we have to do more with less, in a challenging landscape, with lower pay than the commercial sector.

Some colleagues do not always feel valued. On top of that, school operations are going through a period of deep transformation with the impact of AI. The regulatory environment is increasingly complex, and consolidation in the sector requires different skills and ways of working. So we all know change can be scary, but it can also be exciting and an opportunity for innovation.

So if school business professionals are engaged and supported to adapt, I truly believe that the role can become more impactful, more strategic, and better recognised. But they should not do this alone. And SBPs should really engage in professional development opportunities and in local and national networks.

So, what are those key changes for the sector? I think one, is trusts are becoming more complex, with multi-tier governance structures across a portfolio of schools. They are significant employers and all this requires greater expertise. Recruitment is a significant challenge across the education sector and yet many do not have a people strategy.

So we have to accept that we cannot be an expert in everything, but know enough about the other areas to ask the right questions and bring everything together. Avoid working in silos. Keep a holistic approach and understand the local context. 

So it really comes down to teamwork, with a need to specialise in some areas. I like the concept I've heard recently of T-shaped leadership, where the horizontal bar of the T is a generalist and the vertical bar is specialisation. 

The time-saving potential of technology

I also think that technology and AI is here to make a profound impact on the way we are working. And to quote one of my colleagues: it’s no longer acceptable for a school leader to say that you don't do technology.

Yes, it needs to be done in a safe and ethical way, and we need more training to explain to school leaders what that means. But technology has a huge potential to alleviate SBPs workload, and we need to take everyone on board on this journey, including the maintained schools you mentioned earlier.

So we need to use AI to maximise self-service and to help manage knowledge in the organisation. All the purely repetitive tasks are gradually being automated, which will release more time, I believe, for human relationships and strategic work. But we need training on AI literacy at all levels, starting with investing in infrastructure, switches, connectivity.

So all this requires planning. We don't want to end up in a two-tier system, where some with expertise will benefit from streamlined processes and data-driven insights, while others remain bogged down in manual, inefficient systems. Many schools lack a clear digital roadmap and sometimes struggle to make a clear case for investment when there is not enough money in the system.

Skilling up for transformation

So technological adoption and broad operational transformation really require significant strategic planning, sustained investment and expert change management. Some of these complex issues, they can sometimes seem like a foreign language for many working in schools. This really highlights the significant skills gap, where education professionals, traditionally focused on pedagogy, are also asked to navigate complex corporate structures and regulations. I think we have an important role to play here, to ensure head teachers can concentrate on their expertise, leading teaching and learning.

This transformation requires new skills, such as strategic thinking, leadership, data analysis, digital literacy, people management, the ability to handle complex procurement and contract management, and also significant change management, and adaptability. So this is where professional bodies, I believe, play a crucial role in providing a structure, in setting standards, in fostering the development of school business professionals and this collaboration. The ISBL self-assessment tool, for example, helps practitioners identify their current competency gaps and propose some professional development opportunities. 

ISBL has also championed the adoption of the operational excellence framework, which suggests that schools could achieve between 20 and 30% capacity savings. It doesn't mean cost cutting, but removing the bad costs and replacing those by good costs that directly drive outcomes. To achieve this, we also need funding for SBP qualifications and above all, protected time. What I hear is that people don't have time to engage in all this, so we really need to lobby for that.

For me, it doesn't matter what name is on the door. MAT or maintained schools, we need to make sure all SBPs are part of this professional development journey, that no one is left behind and equip them with the skills they need to navigate those future changes, whether that involves joining a MAT or thriving as a strong maintained school.

So I think the SBPs are not peripheral figures. They are central strategic leaders, whose expertise is key for the effective operation and financial sustainability and overall success of the school. 

Listen to the full conversation (33 minutes) with Benedicte Yue on the Creating Value in Schools podcast.

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