Finance

Our ambition for our children and young people is infinite, but our resources are not. We ensure the right level of finance is available for every school to meet the needs of its community. 

At ALT, we utilise GAG pooling, because we recognise the relative demands and pressure on each school are dynamic and there are some factors where schools are hostages to circumstance, such as the age of their buildings. This allows us some flexibility to fund schools under different circumstances. The finance team work closely with local school leaders, local Business Managers and the Education Team to ensure that when budgets are set, they meet the needs of the schools. This is a careful process and reflects our ideology of schools as being unique in their environment and times.

"The Finance team have offered both support and challenge with managing my school budget. As well as our regularly scheduled meetings, they are always on hand to talk through scenarios and offer practical suggestions of how to maximise the funds available. They also question my thinking to ensure I have considered all options and that I am secure in the decisions I am making.

Lauraine Barnes, Head of School, Westwood Primary School

Our Trust is supported by a team of qualified finance professionals with extensive experience in primary, secondary and special education. The Central Finance Team provides transactional financial services to our Trust schools, assisting with budget preparation and regular financial monitoring reports. We collaborate with schools to offer commercial, operational, and procurement support, ensuring we spend every pound wisely for the benefit of our children and young people. Key elements of this achievement included a combination of re-procurement of key contracts, such as catering, broadband and energy while also exiting contracts that were not delivering value for money, such as absence insurance. Over the next course of 3 years these changes will amount to over £0.5m worth of savings.

We also work hard to maximise income generation from our available resources, whether that’s letting out our sports facilities and community assets or generating investment income. Since January 2024 the Trust has been one of the highest performers in the East of England for maximising investment income following a Trust-wide approach, re-organising management of cash and banking solutions in a centralised model. This has seen investment income increase by nearly £250k compared to the year before.

Our team is dedicated to ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements and helps schools evaluate the financial implications of various proposals. This includes handling statutory compliance such as annual audits, VAT returns, and grant audits.

Our finance team brings extensive experience in providing advice, training, and consultancy to the Finance Leads in our schools and within the broader region. Our services include:   

  • Training and Support: Training and mentoring for finance staff and leaders, including interim financial leadership as required.   
  • Review and Innovate: Financial health checks, such as budget and systems reviews, and regular reporting and budget monitoring, which includes the evaluation of revenue streams and identification of commercial opportunities.   
  • Intelligent Budgeting: Benchmarking of curriculum and other expenditures, including integrated curriculum financial planning and zero-based budgeting where appropriate.   
  • Support for Change: Support and advice on transitioning to an academy or multi-academy trust.  

We also work collaboratively with other academy trusts and take an active system leadership role

  • We provided interim CFO support to another local multi-academy trust for four months during the 2024/25 academic year, supporting them while they made a substantive appointment.
  • The Trust’s CFO, Phil Beecher, coordinates the local academy trust CFO forum, which is an effective network for sharing best practice across the sector locally as well chairing the Audit & Risk Committees of two other trusts.
  • For this community and sector-focused work alongside the improvement in financial efficiency and effectiveness across the Trust, our CFO won CFO of the year for 2025.