Most of what an owner is shown about a school is old news by the time it arrives. September enrolment reflects choices families made over the previous autumn, winter and spring, and because revenue depends on enrolment and margin depends on revenue, those figures are later still. It is quite possible for a board to review a healthy set of numbers during the same month that the school has started to weaken, and for the monthly pack to show no sign of it until the following year.
That delay has a practical cost. A problem that is picked up early can usually be dealt with through a conversation with the head and an adjustment to the plan. Once it has reached the accounts, the owner is typically paying for extra marketing and fee concessions to refill places, and in some cases for a change of leadership.
A school dashboard, in the sense used by GSE, is a single page that the board reads each month. It keeps the financial figures owners already rely on and adds a small number of indicators that tend to move earlier. Deciding which indicators go on the page is the hard part and has little to do with software, and the six that follow are examples of the choices involved.
The familiar figures arrive late
Headcount, revenue, cash and margin should stay on the page. They are audited, they can be compared between schools, and lenders understand them. The difficulty is that all four run behind events.
A family that decides in March to leave will usually stay on the roll, and in every report, until the end of the summer term. Fees and deposits from that family continue to arrive on schedule in the meantime, so revenue and cash look normal as well. Margin is slower again, because teaching staff are contracted in the spring and most other costs are fixed for the year soon afterwards. When enrolment comes in lower than planned, almost all of the shortfall goes straight to the bottom line, in a year whose costs were committed before the shortfall was visible.
Ask families in February whether they are coming back
In many schools the first reliable information about leavers is the formal notice families give in the final term. That leaves a few weeks to fill each place, at a point in the year when most families in the market have already chosen a school.
Asking every family at mid-year whether they intend to return, whether through a short survey or an early re-enrolment deposit, brings that information forward by four to six months. The overall percentage is worth tracking, but the breakdown by year group is usually more useful. If the doubtful families are concentrated in the last year of primary, the likely issue is confidence in the secondary school, and when most of them turn out to be in a single class it is worth finding out what is happening in that classroom. A family that is unsure in February will often stay if the concern is addressed, which is much harder to achieve once notice has been given.
Watch the discount line as closely as the headcount
It is possible for a school to stay full while the income from each student falls. For that reason the dashboard should show discounts, scholarships and other concessions as a share of gross fees each month, along with who approved them.
If that share is rising while headcount stays level, the school is maintaining its roll by giving fees away. The cost builds over time, because a discount given on entry is rarely withdrawn, and a concession used to fill a Year 3 place may still be in force ten years later. Other parents also tend to hear about it and ask for similar terms. Net fee income is affected in the same year, but the full cost only becomes clear over three to five years as the discounted cohorts move up the school. An owner who reviews the figure monthly can raise it while only a few families are involved.
Compare predicted grades with actual results every year
Teachers predict external examination grades each spring, and the results arrive in August. Owners are rarely shown how the two compare, and they should be, because the comparison says a good deal about how well the school knows its students.
Where predictions and results are close, teachers are assessing accurately and the board can have reasonable confidence in the internal progress data it receives during the year. A wide gap in either direction means that the internal data should be treated with caution. Over-prediction tends to do the most damage, since families base university applications on predicted grades and hold the school responsible when the results fall short.
Because examinations happen once a year, this indicator moves slowly. A gap identified in August can be worked on during the following year, but the board will not know whether the work succeeded until the next set of results, and a school that never reviews the comparison loses that year each time.
Staff turnover reaches parents about a year later
International schools that recruit from overseas generally ask teachers to confirm by December or January whether they will return for the following year. For an owner this is the earliest firm indication of staff turnover. Parents first encounter the replacement teachers in August, and any effect on re-enrolment appears the spring after that, so the full sequence takes somewhere between twelve and eighteen months.
Published research links turnover closely to school leadership, which is one reason it belongs in front of the board. A study of 22 international schools in the Near East and South Asia found average annual teacher turnover of 17 per cent, with individual schools ranging from none to 60 per cent, and reported that the factor most strongly associated with turnover was whether teachers regarded the head of school as supportive (Mancuso, Roberts and White, Journal of Research in International Education, 2010). An earlier paper in the same journal, drawing on a survey of 270 schools, reported an annual rate of 14.4 per cent (Odland and Ruzicka, 2009).
Sector averages are of limited use to an individual owner. It is more informative to compare the school with its own record in previous years, and to look at how many posts are unfilled and how long each has been open. A vacancy in a shortage subject that is still open in March will be difficult to fill well before September.
Read the leadership minutes as a series
One item on the page cannot be expressed as a number. Most schools require minutes of leadership meetings, and in most schools the minutes are filed and never looked at again. Reading a term of minutes in sequence shows whether the issues raised in those meetings are being resolved.
A practical way to do this is to count the action points that are carried over from one meeting to the next without a named person responsible or a completion date. If that number grows through the term, the leadership team is aware of its problems and is failing to deal with them, and the effects will reach the other indicators eventually. It is also worth noting attendance, because when particular members of the team stop attending, or are no longer recorded as contributing, important decisions are probably being made elsewhere. GSE has written separately about how to use school meeting minutes as management information.
Act when the early indicators weaken, even if the accounts look fine
The most useful moment on a dashboard is when the financial figures are healthy and the earlier indicators have started to decline, because action at that point is relatively inexpensive. The board’s role is to ask the head and the management team how they interpret the change and what they propose to do, and then to follow up on the agreed date. Taking over the response directly is a separate and more serious decision, for reasons set out in GSE’s article on governance structures.
Early indicators will sometimes mislead, and a fall in re-enrolment intent might reflect nothing more than a single large employer moving its staff out of the city. As a working rule, a board can wait for two consecutive readings, or for two separate indicators to move in the same direction, before it changes course.
The opposite situation also occurs, with weak accounts and improving early indicators, in which case the school is probably already recovering, and cost reductions imposed at that stage can set the recovery back.
The limits of a one-page view
These six indicators are examples, and in practice a dashboard would normally carry ten to twelve, chosen for the particular school. A school of 300 students in its second year will be most concerned with enquiry conversion and with filling its entry-level year groups, while a school of 2,000 that has been open for twenty years will pay more attention to retention and examination results.
A dashboard also has obvious limits, since it can show an owner where to look and it still takes visits to the school, and conversations with the people who work there, to understand what is being seen.
Read next
- The 360-Degree School Review. How a combined education and financial review examines what a dashboard can only flag.
- Governance Structures That Attract Education Investors. What the board is for, and where its oversight should stop.
- What is a School Management Contract? How reporting duties and operating authority are divided between owner and operator.
- What is an Education Management Organisation (EMO)? What an operator takes responsibility for under a management agreement.
To talk about your school project, reach us through the contact page.