Effective use of funding and resources
Resources delivered through the School Budget Allocation Report (SBAR) need to be effectively aligned to initiatives in the School Excellence cycle's Strategic Improvement Plan (SIP).
Strategic resourcing
The School Excellence Framework (SEF) states:
In schools that excel, resources are strategically used to achieve high quality service delivery and improved student outcomes.
Strategic resourcing is the targeted alignment of resources to school initiatives to ensure the maximum impact on students' outcomes.
Resources delivered through the School Budget Allocation Report (SBAR) need to be effectively aligned to the initiatives in your Strategic Improvement Plan (SIP).
Your school’s Strategic Improvement Plan (SIP) will identify school staffing and other resources that are needed to achieve the desired impact. Your school should regularly monitor and adjust the allocation of resources to ensure effective implementation of the Strategic Improvement Plan (SIP).
Funding should be expended in the calendar year in which the funds are received to enable student needs to be fully supported.
Planning for strategic resourcing
Strategic improvement planning, budgeting and resourcing are interconnected. Your Strategic Improvement Plan (SIP) consists of 2 parts:
- a published Strategic Improvement Plan (SIP)
- an implementation and progress monitoring section, which is an internal school working document.
Your school needs to identify the level of resource contribution required from the key funding sources toward each activity in the ‘implementation and progress monitoring’ table in SPaRO.
A budget will be developed to reflect your funding allocation in the SBAR. Funds for each of these allocations need to be deliberately targeted to address the needs of your students.
Your school will analyse, reflect and report on the outcomes of your high-level projects, activities and/or processes undertaken, in order to achieve your improvement measures.
Benefits of strategic resourcing
Benefits of strategic resourcing for your school and students include:
- assisting school leaders to effectively plan and utilise available resources to best meet your student needs
- ensuring strong links between your school and student outcomes, your Strategic Improvement Plan (SIP) and school resourcing
- enabling effective school resource management
- ensuring the purposeful use of needs-based funding, for example, our English language proficiency (ELP) funding supports all our English as an additional language or dialect (EAL/D) students
- ensuring transparency of decision-making about school strategies and financial management.
Strategic resourcing and the School Excellence cycle
- Using available data, analyse the impact of resourcing on the achievement of your current strategic directions and improvement measures.
- Following the analysis of current school and student needs, identify the available human and financial resources that will be available to support improvements in these areas.
- Describe the measurable impacts you are aiming to achieve in student outcomes for each of the equity groups in your school.
- Align resources to initiatives to ensure the maximum impact on student outcomes.
- Make strategic resourcing decisions that ensure that your students’ learning and wellbeing needs remain central.
- Allocate available resources to your activities.
- Identify budget sources for your activities.
- Develop a funding plan that utilises annual budget and resource allocation to best support the needs of the current cohort of students.
- Establish relevant progress measures for all of your equity groups.
- Use data to support strategic planning and decisions that are outcomes focused.
- Reallocate resources, if required, to achieve your desired outcomes.
The planning process
Principals will be aware of the resources that are available within your school to support the implementation of your Strategic Improvement Plan (SIP).
The amount and type of resources available will inform the extent to which your initiatives and activities can be implemented.
Animation - Resourcing your Strategic Improvement Plan (SIP)
A school's Strategic Improvement Plan (SIP) maps the steps towards improved student outcomes. In the animation, Resourcing your SIP, see how you can use your SBAR allocation to resource your SIP for continuous improvement and school excellence.
Understanding strategic resourcing
Strategic resourcing is:
- effectively planning and managing critical resources provided through the SBAR to support the delivery of your strategic directions as identified in your Strategic Improvement Plan (SIP) to best meet student needs
- ensuring your school’s strategic directions reflect the school’s priorities for improvement and align with needs-based funding and the needs of specific equity groups within your school
- constructing effective improvement measures and selecting evidence-based strategies to support the local context of your school and student needs
- embedding the needs of specific equity groups into your school’s strategic directions to ensure the school’s focus is on effectively aligning resources
- combining and using your school’s total resources flexibly to respond to the additional learning needs of all students in your school
- reportable at both your local school community and system level.
Strategic resourcing is not:
- underspending resources so that your funds are rolled over from one calendar year to the next, disadvantaging students for that year
- unplanned resourcing decisions that are not aligned to your strategic planning and intended outcomes
- using needs-based funding to resource broad initiatives that do not target your specific student equity groups.
Reflective questions on strategic resourcing
- Have we planned to use the resource allocations in the calendar year in which they are received to fully support our student needs?
- Have we effectively aligned resources to the initiatives in our Strategic Improvement Plan (SIP) to ensure maximum impact for our students?
- Have our strategic resourcing decisions ensured the learning and wellbeing needs of our students remain central to all of our school’s local decision making?
- Have our school’s strategic resourcing decisions been based specifically on our school context and size?
- Have suitable targets, including system-negotiated targets if appropriate, and other improvement measures been established for all equity groups at our school?
- Have we described the measurable impact on student outcomes we are planning to achieve for each equity group in our school?
- Is there evidence available to show that resource allocation is effectively meeting our needs?
- Do our resources need to be reallocated to achieve the desired/ planned outcomes?
- Have we communicated transparently with all of our school community about how we are using our resources?
Learn more
Find out more about School Excellence in Action.