The Next 20: Schools Buying Strategy - 10 Years On
In the latest episode of our 'The Next 20' series, Antonio Weiss is joined by Reza Schwitzer and Katie Burns to discuss how the schools buying strategy saved £1bn, and what it still teaches us about reform, behaviour change and public value today.
Ten years ago, amid mounting funding pressures on schools, the Department for Education faced a stark challenge: how to help thousands of autonomous schools save money without damaging educational outcomes – and without simply telling them what to do.
In this episode of The Next 20, we revisit that challenge with three people who worked on it: Antonio Weiss, Senior Partner at The PSC, Reza Schwitzer, now Director of Assessment Reform at AQA, and Katie Burns, Associate Partner at The PSC. Together, they reflect on one of the most impactful public sector innovation programmes of the last decade – and why its lessons are even more relevant today.
The challenge: funding pressure without levers
From 2015 onwards, schools faced an unprecedented squeeze on funding – around an 8% real-terms pressure per pupil. With 75–80% of school budgets tied up in staffing, the risk was clear: savings would come from cutting teachers and teaching assistants.
But the policy environment had changed; academisation and school autonomy meant the Department for Education couldn’t simply mandate new behaviours, meaning the solution would need to influence, not instruct.
A shift from procurement to behaviour change
Early research revealed a crucial insight: this wasn’t really a procurement problem. It was a hearts-and-minds challenge.
Schools were spending around £10bn a year on non-staff costs, often through highly manual, inefficient processes – from comparing supplier catalogues line by line to renegotiating complex catering and cleaning contracts with little specialist support. Saving £1bn was possible, but only through thousands of better micro-decisions rather than one big intervention.
Designing for a complex system
Instead of defaulting to a single national buying platform, the strategy took a system-wide, user-centred approach:
- Advice hubs to support schools with complex contracts they only renegotiated every few years
- Peer networks that leveraged trust between schools rather than top-down enforcement
- Professionalisation of school business managers, recognising them as a critical – and previously under-valued – profession
- Simpler, school-friendly frameworks and language, removing barriers to engagement
The focus wasn’t on forcing compliance, but on designing support that schools genuinely wanted to use.
Lasting impact
The results speak for themselves: over £1bn in savings was achieved against projected costs, with hundreds of millions evidenced within the first few years. More importantly, the approach stuck.
A decade on, schools buying support is embedded, politically resilient and widely accepted as “just how things are done”. The rise of school business professionals – now with their own institute, networks and professional status – remains one of the programme’s most lasting legacies.
What this means for the next 20 years
As we look to the next 20 years of public services, the core lesson is clear: meaningful public service reform requires long-term thinking, clarity of purpose and genuine user-centred design. In a world of constrained funding and complex systems, the answer isn’t always more control – it’s better design. As Reza argues in the podcast, if an intervention can survive multiple Secretaries of State and changes of government, it’s probably doing something right.
The PSC has delivered lasting public impact since 2006. If you'd like to find out more about how we can support your organisation to implement change that sticks, get in touch with us at hello@thepsc.co.uk - we'd love to chat.
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