Optimising college performance

Why do you benchmark?

I think it's because all colleges are different and it's a way of validating what we think we know about ourselves by comparison with a sector benchmark set. So, for me, when variances to the benchmark are thrown up, it's a question of can you rationalise that? And quite often you can rationalise it, and that confirms what you know about yourselves; but where you can't rationalise it, that gives you the opportunity to go deeper and learn something, and obviously apply that learning. So, for us, it has helped sharpen internal contribution accounting, financial performance, and curriculum areas, as well as confirming or challenging us on how much we're spending on certain central services. I don't think we're ever just concerned that we conform to a benchmark - that doesn't feel like the right thing to do - we should be comfortable in our own shoes as to who we are and what we do, and why we do it. What we're trying to confirm is that those things have value, or have the value that we think they have.

What does Tribal's Benchmarking curriculum-level analysis provide?
So, for me, it has been more about informing the development of a curriculum financial model, as that just happens to have been the position we've been in - we haven't had a very mature financial model for the curriculum, so it has been informing that.
Also, it is helpful for me to go back and say, “Look, the curriculum area you’re managing is like ‘this’, but another college with a similar curriculum area would perform like ‘that’. Why?” And if they can come back and say it’s because we clearly understand we do a lot more high-level education than most people would do and that has a different cost profile, or conversely, we have a lot more lower level - if you can rationalise it, then fine. Otherwise, we're just doing an internal benchmarking exercise between one curriculum area and a completely different curriculum. There's no reason why A-levels should perform the same as construction engineering or art, but without some external reference it's hard to predict what some of the variances should be - we know they should be different, but we don't know quite why.

What factors affected your decision to Benchmark this year?
For us, it's because the college has been emerging from a period of financial difficulty. So, with the benchmarking we did during that period of financial difficulty, we did try and take a slightly innovative approach. We didn't just benchmark the financials; we didn't just benchmark the budget; we did a construct of the two. But the advantage of that first exercise was to confirm and help shape the savings we have to make.

For you, how does Tribal’s Benchmarking model differ to other models available?
What we like with the Tribal model is that we get down into the college - it’s not just high-level financial health information. That's why we pay for it, and if we didn't think there's more value in it, we wouldn’t come to you.