We launched an important study to help drive change within the education sector at the recent Confederation of School Trusts (CST) Finance and Operations Conference 2025, which took place this week, on 6th February.
The study, which comprises of free catering cost benchmarking across school trusts in the UK, will help drive real change within the industry. It’s the first study that seeks to obtain data from senior school operations where multiple factors influence operational performance.
The Confederation of School Trusts is the sector body that brings together and speaks on behalf of school trusts. It represents more than 70% of the academy sector in England and their members are responsible for the education of more than three million young people and children. The Conference united school trust leaders from across England and was the perfect event to launch the study.
We also exhibited and spoke at the Conference, and our Education Consultancy Director Joe Parfitt, and our Senior Consultant Mike Neales hosted a workshop: “How do you know you are operating efficiently? Using data to get best value from your catering and cleaning services.” In the workshop, they looked at how Multi-Academy Trusts can measure how well their catering and cleaning services are performing, where the biggest cost-efficiencies lie and how best to balance cost and quality in service delivery.
Once our benchmarking study is complete, we’ll be sharing the findings with CST members. Given how transformative we anticipate the findings to be, we’re also planning on rolling the study out wider within the sector in the future.
Stay tuned!
The Litmus team