Troubled trust with £8m deficit to be broken up

[JazzFlute]

Some top notch management here

 

https://schoolsweek.co.uk/troubled-trust-with-8m-deficit-to-be-broken-up/

 

 

[synaesthesia]

Hilariously bad. It'd be funny if it wasn't ultimately our money. Badly thought out hairbrained schemes like 1:1 provision of iPads and no plan for them. This is what shiny-shiny syndrome does.

[DrBeaker]

Poor management and bad decisions using public money. 

 

Same as govt...schools HAVE no money. They have TAXPAYERS money. 

And should be diligent in spending every penny of that cash.

 

 

[JazzFlute]

3 minutes ago, DrBeaker said:

Poor management and bad decisions using public money. 

 

Same as govt...schools HAVE no money. They have TAXPAYERS money. 

And should be diligent in spending every penny of that cash.

 

 

 

Shocking management which has ultimately affected hundreds of good staff and thousands of pupils.  Majority of schools in trust are primaries too and they thought it would be good to have 1:1 iPads?  The cost will probably be huge too when the schools move to other trusts as imagine all the unpicking that needs to be done when moving to a new trust and maybe different ways of working like new MIS, online resources, M365/Google change to note a few.  Transition period will affect everyone and pupils/staff obviously suffer the most just because of a few high paid staff who probably have earnt there money out the trust made bad decisions and left with a good pay-packet or at the very least a good few years on a high salary

[2ilent8cho]

Just seems like really bad management, many trusts and schools have 1:1 devices, we have since 2009, originally Netbooks until 2009 to 2013, then iPads. We don't have finance issues like that in our trust. 

[synaesthesia]

6 minutes ago, 2ilent8cho said:

Just seems like really bad management, many trusts and schools have 1:1 devices, we have since 2009, originally Netbooks until 2009 to 2013, then iPads. We don't have finance issues like that in our trust. 

Exactly - no clear plan for what they're going to be used for is a plan for failure. It's clear they didn't because they're rushing to hand them back at the end of the lease.

[sigma]

2 hours ago, DrBeaker said:

Poor management and bad decisions using public money. 

 

Same as govt...schools HAVE no money. They have TAXPAYERS money. 

And should be diligent in spending every penny of that cash.

 

 

“Taxpayers” money is “everybody’s” money.  Even a child buying a Freddo with their pocket money is paying tax on it.  It should still be spent diligently however.

[DrBeaker]

5 hours ago, sigma said:

“Taxpayers” money is “everybody’s” money.  Even a child buying a Freddo with their pocket money is paying tax on it.  It should still be spent diligently however.

 

Schools, Trusts and government don't generate money or services like the private sector does and can.

 

If I'm a director of a private company and make £20K profits. I can decide what to do with that, even if it's a new car, a yacht etc as long as my employees are paid and bills paid.

 

If I'm a director of a school, I can't generate £20K 'profit' without cutting costs, services, contracts etc

 

I know these are oversimplified examples but you get the point.

 

Private sector can do what they want with their money, the public sector can't and because of it's scarcity should be even more careful.

E.g. when we used to replace keyboards and mice we'd try and reuse every possible part but we see the amount of waste of money in every other department  and wonder why we bother

 

[mikes]

I bet a large amount of the waste in this instance won't even be tech; it'll be from staffing issues.  Bloated leadership, long term sick, etc.  And I can see they leased devices too, who wants to bet they paid more in leasing than they would have had they just bought the devices outright

[sigma]

4 minutes ago, mikes said:

I bet a large amount of the waste in this instance won't even be tech; it'll be from staffing issues.  Bloated leadership, long term sick, etc.  And I can see they leased devices too, who wants to bet they paid more in leasing than they would have had they just bought the devices outright

As someone who worked for a hardware company who both sold and leased kit, they most likely did pay more by leasing than purchasing because leasing incurs the additional cost of money.  The main advantage of leasing is that it shows up in a different part of your balance sheet which can sometimes be an advantage.

[synaesthesia]

15 minutes ago, mikes said:

I bet a large amount of the waste in this instance won't even be tech; it'll be from staffing issues.  Bloated leadership, long term sick, etc.  And I can see they leased devices too, who wants to bet they paid more in leasing than they would have had they just bought the devices outright

Oooh yes. If done badly they can be a proper chain around the neck. A previous SBM here thought it was a great idea to lease our phone system including the handsets themselves. With no exagguration, the cost of the lease for one quarter (3 months) of this 5 year agreement was more than it is costing us to procure a new cloud hosted 3CX system, years license, installation/setup fees and SIP rentals altogether. If we add in the cost of new handsets (which we are thankfully not needing to do) it would have been about £100 more than that single quarterly payment. 80 phones.

Sometimes it's good to spread the payments or shift the balance sheets around a bit - just not when they're doing it knowing it's not going to be their problem in a few months!

Same with our Inventry - expensive enough on it's own, but the lease (same company) was diabolical. Now say that word how Billy Butcher says it.

One year of Inventry lease not including the actual licensing for Inventry itself, paid for 3 years of SignInApp, the MIS integration, a brand new iPad, stand, the RFID reader thing and still enough spare to buy another iPad if we so wished.

 

[DrBeaker]

2 hours ago, mikes said:

I bet a large amount of the waste in this instance won't even be tech; it'll be from staffing issues.  Bloated leadership, long term sick, etc.  And I can see they leased devices too, who wants to bet they paid more in leasing than they would have had they just bought the devices outright

 

This is what we've seen so many times.  

 

Roles that didn't exist at the start magically created, then you find out they're related to someone in the Trust.

Excessive amounts of leadership that don't seem to do anything.