Raising the MAT Standard

Bringing the sector together

With financial pressure continuing to evolve across the education landscape, School Business Services recently hosted a webinar, Raising the MAT Standard, to explore how trusts are responding in practice.

The session featured Michelle Williams, CFO at Shaw Education Trust, who shared her experience of leading finance across a 31-school trust in the West Midlands. With nearly 30 years in the public sector, spanning local authorities and colleges, Michelle offered a candid view of the realities facing finance leaders today and how trusts can respond.

Sector challenges: navigating uncertainty and increasing complexity

A clear message from Michelle’s perspective is that the financial challenge for trusts has fundamentally changed.

“It’s no longer just about balancing a budget,” she explained. “It’s about maintaining strategic optionality in a constrained system.”

What trusts are experiencing is not a short-term squeeze, but a set of structural pressures. Funding lag, workforce cost increases, rising SEND demand, estate liabilities, and growing scrutiny are all converging. This is placing finance leaders under increasing pressure to respond quickly and accurately.

This has reshaped the role of the CFO. As Michelle described, finance leaders are now operating as risk leaders first, and finance technicians second. Decisions are being made at greater speed, with less tolerance for error, and often with incomplete information.

“In my experience, the pressure isn’t just financial, it’s informational,” she said. “How confident are we in our forecasting? How quickly can we model decisions? How early are we identifying risks?”

This “informational pressure” is compounded by the expectation to forecast further ahead. While three-year planning has traditionally been the norm, Michelle highlighted the need for a much longer-term view.

“If we were working in a global organisation, we’d be forecasting 10, 15, 20 years ahead. That’s where we need to get to.”

Alongside this, trusts are managing very real and immediate pressures. Rising SEND demand is having a significant impact, with funding models tightening in some areas and delays in EHCP processes creating additional strain. Falling birth rates are also beginning to feed through the system, particularly in primary schools, requiring trusts to rethink capacity and planning assumptions across entire cohorts.

At the same time, staffing pressures remain a constant challenge. Pay awards, minimum wage increases, and funding uncertainty make workforce planning increasingly difficult, while inflation, particularly in areas such as energy, continues to create volatility in operational costs.

Overlaying all of this is a growing compliance burden. As Michelle noted, experienced finance professionals are often spending a significant proportion of their time on reporting, returns and scrutiny requirements, limiting their ability to focus on strategic planning.

“The scrutiny that MATs are under now is incredible,” she said. “You can get so bogged down in compliance that it takes time away from actually planning ahead and supporting schools.”

Opportunities: thinking differently to drive sustainability

Despite these challenges, Michelle’s perspective was not one of constraint alone. Throughout the discussion, she highlighted a number of practical ways trusts can respond, many of which centre on thinking differently about resources, collaboration, and investment.

One key area is the more consistent use of planning tools such as Integrated Curriculum Financial Planning (ICFP). Rather than being used reactively when a school faces deficit, Michelle described how Shaw Education Trust is embedding this as a regular, proactive exercise.

By modelling curriculum and staffing requirements against anticipated pupil numbers, the trust has been able to make significant efficiencies. In one example, this approach delivered a £680,000 saving in a single secondary school.

Alongside this, benchmarking and collaboration across the sector remain powerful but often underutilised tools. Michelle emphasised the value of comparing spend and practice with other trusts, and being open to learning from peers.

“We can still learn from others,” she said. “If another trust is spending significantly less in an area, the question is - what are they doing differently?”

Operationally, many of the opportunities come from greater centralisation and integration. At Shaw Education Trust, this has included bringing together systems across finance, HR, MIS and budgeting, as well as reviewing software more broadly to ensure it delivers both value for money and the functionality schools need.

This move towards integration is also creating space for automation and emerging technologies such as AI. While still in the early stages, Michelle shared examples of how automation is already reducing manual workload, freeing up time for more valuable activity.

However, some of the most impactful opportunities come from rethinking how existing resources are used.

A standout example from the discussion was the trust’s approach to estate utilisation. Faced with falling primary pupil numbers and increasing demand for SEND provision, Shaw Education Trust reviewed how space across its schools could be better used.

In one case, an underutilised primary school site was partially repurposed to accommodate SEND pupils, with support from the local authority to fund the necessary adaptations. This not only addressed capacity challenges, but also created a more sustainable financial model for the school.

More broadly, this approach has enabled the trust to secure significant additional funding, around £5.4 million in one year, while ensuring pupils are educated closer to their communities, rather than being placed in costly independent provision.

“It’s about being proactive,” Michelle explained. “If we’ve got space, how can we use it to support children in our community and create a more sustainable model?”

Another area of innovation has been in how the trust approaches investment.

Rather than leaving reserves in low-return accounts, Shaw Education Trust has begun investing in low-risk funds, supported by guidance available through the DfE. The returns from these investments are then reinvested into schools through a corporate social responsibility fund.

This has enabled the trust to fund projects that would previously have been out of reach: from sensory rooms in primary schools to playground improvements and wellbeing initiatives such as yoga provision.

For school leaders, this has been a tangible and visible benefit.

“Headteachers really appreciate it,” Michelle said. “They feel like they’re getting something back, being able to invest in things that have a direct impact on their children.”

Case study: enabling data-driven decisions with SBS Financial Planner

Alongside these strategic changes, a key part of Shaw Education Trust’s approach has been improving how financial data is used across the organisation.

Having implemented SBS Financial Planner, the trust has been able to move towards a more responsive, data-driven model of financial planning.

For Michelle, one of the most immediate differences was the speed and responsiveness of the system.

“We needed something where we could plan financially and respond to changes instantly,” she explained. “With SBS Financial Planner, you put something in—and it happens.”

This responsiveness is particularly important in a trust environment, where decisions often need to be modelled across multiple schools quickly.

Another significant benefit has been the ability to manage assumptions centrally. Rather than duplicating work across schools, updates can be made once and applied consistently across the trust.

“We can now push things out centrally, that has been a huge time saver. It's reduced elements of risk and error. It's quality assured centrally, because we're only inputting it once, we're not inputting it 31 times. We can now standardise the assumptions across our schools and we can make those updates quickly.”

This has reduced both workload and risk, while improving consistency and confidence in the data.

The platform has also provided greater visibility at every level of the organisation. Finance teams can move easily between individual schools, sectors, and the trust as a whole, enabling more informed and timely decision-making.

For headteachers, access to real-time data has been transformative. With actuals and commitments updated daily, leaders can make informed decisions independently, without waiting for finance support.

“They can log on and see exactly what they have available,” Michelle said. “That’s given them real confidence to make decisions.”

At board level, improved access to data has changed the nature of reporting. Rather than reviewing large volumes of information, trustees are now able to focus on key metrics and question areas of variance.

This shift towards reporting by exception has streamlined governance and improved oversight.

Operationally, the trust has also seen a reduction in manual processes and consolidation work. By bringing planning and reporting into a single system, the need to move data between spreadsheets and systems has been significantly reduced.

The impact of this is measurable.

“We’ve calculated it’s around four hours a month per school that it’s saving us.”

Across 31 schools, this represents a substantial release of capacity. This is time that is now being redirected towards scenario planning, workforce modelling, and strategic support for school leaders.

Perhaps most importantly, this shift has enabled a change in how the finance team operates.

Previously focused on reporting and compliance, the team is now more visible within schools, working alongside leaders on business cases and future planning.

“SBS Financial Planner has given us more time to focus on strategy, rather than just the day-to-day.”

What emerges from Michelle’s experience is a clear picture of a sector in transition.

The challenges facing MATs are significant and unlikely to ease in the short term. However, they are also driving change, encouraging trusts to rethink how they plan, how they invest, and how they use data.

Raising the standard is not about doing more with less, but about making better, more informed decisions in an increasingly complex environment.

And as this discussion shows, the trusts that are embracing that shift are already seeing the benefits.

Contact our team today to book a demo of SBS Financial Planner and raise your trust budgeting to the MAT Standard.

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Raising the MAT Standard: Insight from the Sector and Shaw Education Trust