The Institute of School Business Leadership (ISBL) has released results of their extensive workforce survey of the school business leadership community. The aim was to understand the size of the sector and the scope of roles.
Areas covered in the report include an analysis of issues raised via a survey conducted with over 900 practitioners including:
- Gender and ethnic diversity
- Strategic leadership involvement
- Job roles and titles
- Workload
- Access to CPD
- Qualifications
Key findings
- The data presents an encouraging pipeline, with 24% of respondents having moved into the profession in the last seven years. With 27% of respondents aged 55+ within ten years of state retirement age, the new influx could alleviate the impact of this.
- Over half of school business managers and senior generalists (individual school) had been in role for over 13 years, with 53% of school business managers having never changed roles and 38% having never moved schools.
- An analysis of ‘contracts’ (working hours, contract type and salary) presented a trend of respondents working above contracted hours and a lower-than-national-average salary across the sample. 56% of respondents work 52-week contracts and 76% work more than 35 hours per week. 35% of respondents work term-time only. This has implications in terms of well-being, work–life balance and attraction and retention of diverse talent into the workforce.
- Just over half (55%) said they attended all SLT meetings, and 29% said they were occasionally invited to specific meetings to contribute.
- The findings on qualifications/CPD engagement highlighted a range of CPD engagement and qualification levels; however a dip in Level 5 and Level 7 qualifications presents implications of a knowledge gap in certain areas. Level 4 was the highest qualification for over a third of the sample (36%), with level 6 following (20%). 74% of respondents held a bespoke school business professional qualification, 43% L4/CSBM and 23% L5/DSBM. A third (35%) also held bachelor's degrees.
You can access NAHT's response to the findings here.
First published 30 January 2020
First published 30 January 2020