We met up with Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council, Services for Children and Young People, Resources Manager, John Barlow to find out how HCSS Education have assisted Tameside with the implementation of FPSadvance.Net within their schools.
The Authority focuses strongly on staff input and development to keep the Authority forward-thinking and innovative. The Authority works hard to build strong, reciprocal relationships with their schools; there is a lot of data sharing and transparency between the LA and schools. “We believe that is why we have such as good relationship with our schools in Tameside; we have a lot of support from schools and they often take up our services” says Resources Manager , John Barlow.
Typical of most Authorities, Tameside had been using a series of Excel spreadsheets to manage schools’ finances. “We did provide our own spreadsheet for schools to use when budget planning; this was in use for well over a decade and was becoming too large to handle the complexities of multi-year budgeting and provided no way of monitoring the outputs or linking the School Development Plan”.
Tameside saw an opportunity to partner with a supplier who would be able to satisfy existing and future requirements. “We deemed our Excel tool as no longer fit for purpose and that is when we saw an opportunity for a way forward with a new product that could manage the process. We really liked the idea of the School Development Plan being tied into the long term budgeting tool; this was a huge benefit”.
Changing systems used by over 100 schools was not an easy task. “We did encounter a small amount of resistance which is only natural, but my feelings were ‘we have to move forward to stand still’.
"FPSadvance.Net© was the only product on the market that met our needs. Our only doubts were how the schools may react to this change, but the feedback has been very positive indeed. The training has been provided by the Local Authority and this has also helped with the implementation process and helped to further cement relationships between the finance team and the schools.”
John went on to say: “The schools were keen to implement the software as soon as possible… this was an excellent result!”