School and Academy Finance Training

BeSpoke Consulting provides school and academy finance training solutions for schools, educational institutions, academies and multi-academy trusts.

Continue your professional development with our training courses

We deliver a wide range of training courses related to schools and educational institutions for senior leaders, executives, teachers, management staff, trustees and school finance staff.

Whether you’re looking for a specific course for one member of your team or you want to bring your governing body up to speed on a particular issue, you’ll find what you’re looking for in our extensive range of training courses. If your requirement or training needs are not mentioned below we can customize training course to suit your specific needs.

Our training includes:

All training can be delivered to groups or individuals and can be adapted to meet the needs of the audience.

Our decorated school finance training courses include, but not limited to:

    • Introduction to school or academy finance: We can teach you which financial terms are required to ensure you are following the requirements managing and understanding a schools finances.
    • Annual budgeting and tracking:  Through our training that is based on learn and implement you will know how to set effective and realistic budgets and tracking thereafter.
    • Financial planning (long term and short term): Planning for the future through effective budget management is crucial for any entity, through our training you will learn how how to set a longer term plan, with ever changing number of students, funding formula, staffing etc. that may effect your funding and expenditure.
    • Excel training for school: MS Excel skills are a necessity for any organization, in our training we will improve your excel skills and discover how to create useful information and reports by learning the most efficient way to use Excel formulas, VLookups etc.
    • The correct Accounting: Accrual base profit & loss i.e. recording income to the month to which it relates. To begin with you can just see which batches are running in June (leave the historical data) and prepare it for June.
    • Batch-wise and class-wise profitability for the batches
    • Department–wise and Consolidated financial statements
    • Trend of per employee revenue/cost/profit

School Finance for Finance Officers and Assistants

Finance staff in schools have important responsibilities and deadlines that need to meet specific financial regulations. Staff who have worked in finance but not in a school, who have never worked in finance, will need to understand these rules and procedures, but also understand how the finance function as a whole works in schools.

Course objectives

The aim of this course, is to help finance staff understand the financial regulations and how to ensure compliance, understand the key financial processes, read financial reports easily and ensure all audit requirements are in place.

This course is designed for all school finance staff, whether experienced and looking for a recap, new to finance or new to schools. It is also suitable for school governors.

Since this is an interactive training so the participants can ask questions and interact with the trainer. Notes, assignments and handouts are also provided.  A printed certificate will be issued on successful completion of all assignments.

Course outline

Session 1

  • Introduction to accounting
  • How schools are funded & how schools spend
  • The accounting process in schools
  • Double entry bookkeeping

Session 2

  • Financial regulations & procedures
    • Appropriate use of funds, Value for Money, Separation of duties, Authorisation
  • Record keeping
  • External Audit & consequences of problems.

Session 3

  • Financial Terminology and concepts
    • Management accounting – Understanding & Reviewing budgets
    • Financial accounting – Understanding & Reviewing Financial Reports

Session 4

  • Period End procedures including VAT & Gift Aid
  • Financial Housekeeping
  • Internal Audit

Other services

Read our blog on how we help schools and academies.