How to save £80m a year
Large schools, and particularly academies, are burning their budgets due to a lack of training, understanding and control - particularly in the area of staff recruitment advertising.
Schools should boycott expensive newspapers like TES, The Guardian and even the local press, and to use more competitive online alternatives.
For example Eteach.com offers a fixed-price unlimited advertising service that will save money especially for larger schools who advertise regularly enough money to employ more teachers, or avoid impending cut backs.
UK schools spend around £68m a year on National Press with the bill for recruitment advertising in the local press coming in at around £20m. Then there are the additional costs of paper-based admin and postage bringing total expenditure to at least £90m a year. (DCSF said it was £120m in 2008).
Just take a look at the figures!
The following comparison takes 100 job postings across 10 schools as an example:
* Eteach Premium: unlimited adverts = 20,000 fixed cost
* Schools Recruitment Service (SRS): Local press @ £500 +250 SRS = 52,500 + TES
* TES Gold: = min 90,000 + newspaper ads
The above is based on Eteach's unlimited ad package, priced at £2,000 per school.
The Schools Recruitment Service (SRS) would cost £250 per school - plus the cost of media. This flawed DCSF-backed system is incapable of bringing the savings schools need.
The TES Gold service is based upon £900 per advert, with newspaper advertising costs still to be added - typically £1600 per combined advert.
The worrying thing is, by using SRS or just TES/Guardian or Local papers schools have no control over their expenditure.
Eteach is a proven medium, with excellent traffic and responses delivered at a fixed price.
The total cost if all secondary schools in England and Wales used Eteach (e.g.5,000 schools x £2,000) would be just £10m – and primary schools could receive a FREE service.
Now that’s a saving at least £80m per annum immediately!
This is an equation I have discussed many times with various MPs, and yet none has had the power or inclination to drive home the obvious savings that we now need.
It’s time to act...
JPH
30 Sept 2009
Stop wasting your schools’ money!
23 Sept 2009
Ed Balls says £2bn to be cut from education budget: top teachers face the axe.
What is Ed Balls thinking?
Increased pressure is being placed upon those in senior roles within schools after Ed Balls made his recent announcement about cutbacks. While head teachers are very skilled professionals, it seems that they are the people likely to lose their jobs if the cuts go ahead.
The success of a good school is down to the skills of head teachers and their staff. Clearly, without good leaders our schools will suffer. But by “thinning out” good leaders - by asking them to manage larger schools or groups of schools - we would be stretching existing resources to their limits. Simply threatening teachers with cuts will have the effect of de-stabilizing many schools.
Serious questions need to be asked about spending within the government, rather than focusing on the people on the front line, who, day in day out, deliver the service to the ultimate end users: our children.
There are many other areas the government could look at before it cuts teachers jobs. One is the investment it’s putting in to the new Schools Recruitment Service.
The DCSF has awarded a contract estimated to be worth £12 million to build and operate the Schools Recruitment Service – ignoring the fact that there are already very viable and capable providers in this space, like Eteach, who can and who already do deliver this service without spending £12 million.
Eteach is committed to reducing the cost of recruitment – and is the only company that can guarantee that it will cut the cost of a school’s recruitment.
“Education - Education – Education” was the pledge from New Labour when they were first elected; now it’s “Education cuts – Education cuts – Education cuts.” What a shocking turnaround!
One thing we know for sure when it comes to cutting costs is that cutting teachers’ and school leaders’ jobs is not the answer.
I am very keen to understand your position on these cutbacks. If you were required to make the decision on where cutbacks should be made, where you would start?
Increased pressure is being placed upon those in senior roles within schools after Ed Balls made his recent announcement about cutbacks. While head teachers are very skilled professionals, it seems that they are the people likely to lose their jobs if the cuts go ahead.
The success of a good school is down to the skills of head teachers and their staff. Clearly, without good leaders our schools will suffer. But by “thinning out” good leaders - by asking them to manage larger schools or groups of schools - we would be stretching existing resources to their limits. Simply threatening teachers with cuts will have the effect of de-stabilizing many schools.
Serious questions need to be asked about spending within the government, rather than focusing on the people on the front line, who, day in day out, deliver the service to the ultimate end users: our children.
There are many other areas the government could look at before it cuts teachers jobs. One is the investment it’s putting in to the new Schools Recruitment Service.
The DCSF has awarded a contract estimated to be worth £12 million to build and operate the Schools Recruitment Service – ignoring the fact that there are already very viable and capable providers in this space, like Eteach, who can and who already do deliver this service without spending £12 million.
Eteach is committed to reducing the cost of recruitment – and is the only company that can guarantee that it will cut the cost of a school’s recruitment.
“Education - Education – Education” was the pledge from New Labour when they were first elected; now it’s “Education cuts – Education cuts – Education cuts.” What a shocking turnaround!
One thing we know for sure when it comes to cutting costs is that cutting teachers’ and school leaders’ jobs is not the answer.
I am very keen to understand your position on these cutbacks. If you were required to make the decision on where cutbacks should be made, where you would start?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
