School Financial Benchmarking Explained
How to read school income, expenditure, reserves, and per-pupil spending data from DfE sources.
Where the data comes from
School financial data comes from two DfE sources. Academies submit annual Academies Accounts Return (AAR) data. Maintained schools (local authority controlled) submit Consistent Financial Reporting (CFR) data. MATpulse ingests both and normalises them into a single financial profile per school.
Key metrics
Total income includes all grant funding, self-generated income, and donations. Total expenditure covers all spending. In-year balance is income minus expenditure — a deficit means the school spent more than it received. Revenue reserves represent accumulated surpluses (or deficits) carried forward. Per-pupil figures divide totals by the number of pupils on roll.
Staff costs as percentage of income
This is the single most-watched financial metric. Teaching and support staff costs typically account for 70-80% of a school's income. The DfE flags schools where staff costs exceed 78% of income as potentially at risk. On MATpulse, staff costs above 78% appear in red, 75-78% in amber, and below 75% in green.
Reserves as percentage of income
Reserves express how many months of operating costs a school could cover from savings. Schools with reserves below 5% of income have limited financial resilience. The DfE considers reserves above 10% as healthy. Very high reserves (above 40%) may indicate under-spending. Note: for academies, reserves are assessed at trust level by the ESFA, not at individual school level.
Granular expenditure
MATpulse breaks down spending into 31 line items sourced from AAR and CFR data: teaching staff, supply staff, education support, premises, energy, ICT, catering, legal, insurance, and more. Each line shows the amount and its percentage of total income, making it straightforward to spot where a school's spending departs from typical patterns.
Trust central services
Multi-academy trusts retain a portion of their schools' funding for centrally managed services — often called top-slicing. MATpulse shows the total central services expenditure, the centralisation percentage (central spend as a proportion of total trust income), and how that spending breaks down. This data is only available for academies, not maintained schools.