The Efficiency Imperative

There is a particular kind of quiet desperation that sits in the budget planning meetings of English schools right now. Not the dramatic crisis of a school in special measures, or the visible panic of a trust raiding its reserves. Something more persistent, and in some more dangerous: the slow arithmetic of trying to make a fixed amount of money stretch further each year, while the demands placed on every member of staff continue to grow.

The headline funding numbers look reasonable enough, if you do not look too closely. The core schools budget for 2026–27 stands at £67 billion. Per-pupil funding in cash terms has reached £8,580. Ministers point to a 65% increase since 2010–11. What the headline figures do not capture is the experience on the ground: school business managers building budgets around staffing costs that have risen sharply, energy bills that have not come down to pre-crisis levels, and a SEND funding system that is consuming an ever-larger share of what remains.

The Demographic Squeeze

The structural picture is the more concerning one. England's primary school population is projected to fall by more than 300,000 between now and 2030–31. Secondary rolls will begin declining from 2026–27 onwards. Because the majority of school funding follows the pupil, this is not a neutral demographic shift — it is a direct cut to income for thousands of schools, arriving at different times in different places, with no mechanism to smooth the transition.

The pressure is already visible in the data. London has seen primary pupil numbers fall by 9% since 2016, and London Councils estimates that projected further falls will cost primary schools alone around £15 million in funding reductions, and £30 million for secondary. England's largest primary-only trust recorded an in-year operating deficit of £2.1 million in 2023–24, forcing it to draw down reserves. These are not outliers. They are the leading edge of a pattern that will reach many more schools over the next five years.

“When your income falls because fewer children walk through the door, but your fixed costs — the building, the heating, the staff — remain largely constant, you face a structural problem that no amount of goodwill or creative accounting resolves. The only honest answer is to become significantly more efficient with the resources you have.”

Dan Howard, CEO — ProvisionIQ

The SEND Cost Spiral

Beneath the headline budget figures lies a redistribution that has been reshaping school finances for a decade. Since 2019–20, total school funding has grown by approximately £9 billion per year in real terms. But around half of that growth has been absorbed by the rising cost of SEND provision, particularly EHCPs, the volume of which has almost doubled in real terms over the past ten years.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies calculates that once you strip out high-needs funding, mainstream per-pupil spending grew by 37% in cash terms between 2019–20 and 2025–26. The problem is that estimated costs per pupil grew by approximately 38% over the same period. The gap is small, but the direction is clear: in real terms, mainstream schools have not kept pace with their own cost base, even in a period framed politically as significant investment in education.

What ‘Doing More With Less’ Actually Means

The phrase ‘doing more with less’ has become something of a political cliché in public services. In schools, it describes something real and often painful. It means the deputy head who absorbs two roles when a colleague leaves and is not replaced. The SENCO who carries a full teaching timetable alongside statutory responsibilities that would fill a full-time post. The school business manager who is running finance, HR, compliance, and premises across a trust of six schools, supported by systems that do not talk to each other.

The 2024–25 Working Lives of Teachers and Leaders survey found that full-time teachers in England report working an average of 52.4 hours per week. School leaders report 58.2 hours. These are not numbers that leave much margin for the new compliance demands that arrive each September, and 2026–27 brings more of them than most years, with the SEND White Paper reforms beginning to land alongside expanded Ofsted accountability and whole-staff inclusion training requirements.

Efficiency matters. That is not in dispute. The real question is where it can realistically come from, whether the answer is always to ask the same people to work harder, or whether there is a structural conversation to be had about how schools are organised and what they ask their staff to do.

Where the Hours Are Going

Addressing the efficiency problem requires being precise about where the inefficiency actually lives. A nasen and Bath Spa University survey found that 74% of SENCOs spend their allocated time on administration rather than directly supporting learners. A 2025 DfE Technology in Schools survey found that teachers most frequently cited technology as helping reduce administrative burden, but also noted significant barriers, including tools that don't integrate, duplication across platforms, and the financial cost of doing this properly.

• Teachers regularly enter the same child's information into multiple disconnected systems: the MIS, SEND records, reporting platforms, and parental communication tools. None of them update the others.
• Evidence-gathering for Ofsted, local authority reviews, and annual EHCP cycles consumes hours that qualified professionals would prefer to spend on direct support.
• School business managers spend significant time manually reconciling data that an integrated system would surface automatically.
• Leadership teams spend meeting time reconstructing a picture of provision that should be visible in a single place.

None of these are problems that training solves. They are structural inefficiencies baked into how most schools currently manage information, and they are costly in both staff time and, ultimately, in the quality of provision they enable.

“The schools that make it through the next five years are the ones that know where every pound is going and give their staff systems that handle the administration for them.”

Dan Howard, CEO — ProvisionIQ

Technology as a Structural Answer, Not a Magic Fix

There is a temptation, in a period of fiscal constraint, to reach for technology as a cost-cutting tool: automate roles, reduce headcount, declare the efficiency problem solved. That framing misunderstands what the best technology actually does in a school context. It does not replace the SENCO, the business manager, or the school leader. It takes the administrative weight off their shoulders so they can do the job they were trained for.

The DfE and the government's AI taskforce have acknowledged this explicitly, describing safe and effective use of technology in schools as central to their vision. The 2025 Technology in Schools survey found that 61% of leadership teams report reduced workload from technology investment, and that 44% of teachers using generative AI tools report saving three to four hours per week on planning and preparation. These are meaningful numbers in the context of a 52-hour working week.

For SEND specifically, the shift to digital Individual Support Plans (mandated from September 2026) creates, for the first time, a statutory framework that should enable a single, living record of every child's needs and provision, accessible across roles, updateable in real time, and generating the evidence base that the reformed Ofsted framework will increasingly require. That is either a significant new administrative burden landing on already-stretched SENCOs, or it is the mechanism that finally rationalises the patchwork of spreadsheets and shared drives that most schools currently use. The difference between those two outcomes is almost entirely determined by whether the infrastructure behind it is fit for purpose.

A Different Kind of Investment Decision

School leaders are, understandably, cautious about technology spending in a period of budget pressure. Every pound committed to a platform is a pound not committed to a teaching assistant or a book stock. That calculation is real, and no vendor should dismiss it.

The honest version of the argument for investment is this: the cost of not having integrated, efficient systems is already being paid — it is being paid in staff time, in management capacity, in the hours that qualified professionals spend on tasks that do not require their qualifications. It is often not visible as a budget line, but it is real. And as pupil numbers fall, as budgets tighten, and as compliance demands increase, the cost of organisational inefficiency will become harder to absorb.

The schools and trusts that come out of this well are the ones making structural decisions now that they should have made years ago. That means being honest about where staff time is going. It means auditing which processes exist because they have always existed rather than because they are the most effective way of achieving a goal. And it means investing in systems that give everyone, from the class teacher to the CEO of the trust, a clear, accurate, real-time picture of what is happening, without requiring anyone to build it manually.

The money is under genuine pressure. That is unlikely to change. The question facing school leaders is not only how to reduce expenditure; it is how to get more value from the resources they already have. September 2026 is forcing that conversation whether schools are ready for it or not.

Three decisions worth making now

Start with the structural thinking that makes the right technology decision possible — not with procurement.

1. 1Audit where your staff time actually goes, not where you assume it goes. Most school leaders know, broadly, that SEND administration is consuming more time than it should. Fewer have mapped it precisely. Ask your SENCO and business manager to track their time for two weeks. The results are usually more concentrated, and more addressable, than expected.
2. 2Map your current SEND data landscape. How many places does the same pupil information exist? How many systems need updating when a child's needs change? For most schools, the answer reveals a fragmentation problem that has grown organically over years, and that the ISP mandate now makes urgent to address.
3. 3Treat the September 2026 reforms as the forcing function they are. Digital ISPs, annual Inclusion Strategies, and expanded Ofsted accountability are all arriving simultaneously. Schools that build the infrastructure now, rather than reacting to each statutory deadline as it lands, will absorb the change at a fraction of the cost and effort.