Every so often the government tries to justify its public service funding policies by arguing that “efficiencies” can be possible and reaches for the time-honoured cliché: “Savings in the back office can be found.”
Last time was in 2015 when the then chancellor George Osborne’s Comprehensive Spending Review noted that secondary school spending on back-office costs varied significantly between schools and that between 2003 and 2013 back-office spending per-pupil increased by around 60 per cent in real-terms. The implication was clear – some schools should cut back.
Unfortunately, George forgot to mention the caveats in the document from which the figures were drawn (Review of Efficiency in the Schools System, DfE, 2013). This noted that “individual school circumstances vary and condition and size of school buildings will determine certain running costs”. We also questioned the consistency of the data, which the DfE admitted was not the most robust.
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