Bursar’s Review Autumn 2020 Sample

Autumn 2020 www.theisba.org.uk 8 School trading scenarios With both the known and unidentified pressures on the school as a business, generating likely scenarios to assist in the first estimates of financial planning and the risks inherent in the delivery of any plan is necessary. Three will be required: • short-term, which will be taken as being the academic year 2020-21; • medium-term which will be 2021-23; and • long-term which will be 2023 and beyond. The short-term scenario will need to include the following factors as a minimum: • For day schools the number of pupils enrolled, the likely fee income, the capacity of the school under the COVID-19 constraints, the cost of delivering virtual education, the cost of complying with government COVID-19 guidelines within schools and transporting pupils to and from it. It should also include an assessment of the local likelihood of a lockdown owing to an increased infection rate and the effect that may have on the willingness of parents to pay fees as well as the continued delivery of education. • For boarding schools the same factors as for a day school will apply but the question of boarding house capacity, integrating boarding pupils into day school safely, the costs involved in maintaining the physical and mental well-being of staff and pupils, and the costs of complying fully with the COVID-19 guidelines will all need to be noted and risk assessed. One much more subjective area will be the reputation of the UK as seen from abroad. There are several anecdotal reports that tell of parents of international pupils unwilling to send their children back to the UK because they perceive it has handled the COVID-19 pandemic response badly. In the medium term the worst effects of the COVID-19 pandemic will reduce but the efficiency of any vaccine, its availability and the duration of the effective protection each injection offers, will significantly affect the risk to the continued running of schools and the movement of pupils within, and between, countries. Two unknown risks are that of the virus mutating or the effective time of the protection of any vaccine being too short to be of any practical use in providing immunity. In the long term the effects of the pandemic and the measures required to accommodate it will become accepted background to the activities of a school. In addition, the economic effects of Brexit, a new parliament and perhaps a new order of nations from which international pupils are drawn will each be significant factors. Risks The word ‘risk’ can be used in several ways, to mean an unwanted event, its cause, its probability, the statistical expectation or the fact that a decision is made under the conditions of known probabilities. In the absence of any measurement of risk the meaning used here will be ’an unwanted event‘. Finance

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