Multi Lot: School Resource Management Advisers, Accreditation and Chief Financial Officer Mentoring procurements - Contract numbers con_10111, con_10112, con_10113, con_10114

Descriptions

1) In the 2017/18 academic year, ESFA piloted the use of School Resource Management, Advisers (SRMAs). SRMAs have become a core strand of the wider School Resource, Management portfolio supporting DfE’s overarching objective to help schools improve, outcomes for pupils and promote social mobility by getting the best value from all their, resources. The SRMA programme has supported this strategy by developing capacity within, schools through providing them with a sector expert to help identify opportunities to, improve the management of their resources. The SRMA programme has been hugely, successful to date and we now wish to complement this with a Chief Finance Officer (CFO), mentoring programme. , 2) SRMAs provide short term (5 to 10 days) support to trusts and local authorities to help, them make best use of their budgets. A CFO mentoring programme would complement the, SRMA programme by providing longer term support to academy trust CFOs working in the, most challenging situations; those in trusts in intervention, those in trusts that are growing, and those that are new to the sector., 3) A strong system of financial management and control, driven by the CFO, is essential in, ensuring good financial health in any academy trust. We know that new CFOs or those, working in trusts in financial difficulty face particular challenges and a mentor can support, these leaders as they set up systems or bring about better financial performance within their, trust. , 4) A CFO mentoring pilot would help us accurately determine how mentoring can support, and develop academy trust CFOs and explore the value of launching a substantive scheme, for the 2022/23 academic year., 5) ESFA would like to prioritise participants as mentees who fall into the following, categories:, i. CFOs of those trusts that have been identified as being in financial difficulty or not, following administration/procedures associated with good financial governance, for example, trusts that appear on the list of published late financial returners for the last two consecutive, years; and , ii. CFOs who are new to post and/or inexperienced in the academies sector