Impact Story UK Financial Benchmarking Further Education 29.09.2025
Unlocking Value through Benchmarking and Collaborative Sector Working at Forth Valley College.
Background and Challenge
Forth Valley College, like many across the Scottish college sector, faces unprecedented financial pressure. Despite being ahead of the curve in driving efficiencies, the college continues to explore ways to uncover more financially sustainable ways of operating. We hear from Forth Valley’s Director of Finance, Senga McKerr, explaining how the college’s engagement with Etio’s benchmarking is not only identifying new routes to greater efficiencies and savings, but also represents a pioneering approach to informing sustainable financial operations in Further Education.
The Decision to Benchmark
In late 2024, Forth Valley College became the fifth institution to join the Scottish Colleges Collaborative Benchmarking exercise. The drive to join was rooted in two main aims:
- Validation: Evidencing the college’s well-run areas to demonstrate to others, including funding bodies, that that was the case.
- Targeting Improvement: Uncovering quantitative justification for actions to achieve inefficiency in certain areas and provide an evidence base for internal discussions about addressing those areas.
“We felt that it would be money well spent. It wasn’t a difficult decision really. We're ‘looking under every cushion on the sofa’ basically, so anything that helps us to identify other opportunities for savings and efficiencies is a worthwhile strategy. Myself and the leadership team had concerns that we weren't as efficient as we might be in all areas, but we didn't have sufficient evidence.”
Driving Efficiencies with Solid Data
Since participating in the benchmarking exercise, Forth Valley has used the resulting data both as validation and a catalyst for internal change. “We've identified areas we can now review to achieve efficiencies across the three campuses,” Senga explains. This kind of comparison cuts through internal resistance and enables difficult but necessary conversations:
“It really helps those difficult conversations. It’s one thing for us to have conversations with our other finance directors, but it's another thing to have that independent evidence in black and white. And we’ve got buy-in from the whole leadership team so we’re completely signed-up to accepting and responding to the results.”
Collaboration: Scottish Colleges Leading the Way
Historically, benchmarking outputs have largely been a private affair, with the participating college comparing its results against other anonymised colleges’ results in the dataset. There have been instances of colleges informally coming together to discuss their results, but Forth Valley College became the fifth institution to join the Scottish Colleges Collaborative Benchmarking exercise, joining Glasgow Clyde College, Fife College, Dumfries & Galloway College, and Ayrshire College. A sixth member has recently joined - West College Scotland - and has embarked upon the data gathering and analysis to add further context to the group’s results. It represents a pioneering move in UK further education, demonstrating the drive amongst Scottish colleges’ leaders to unlock even greater value from sector benchmarking approaches in order to continuously improve the financial sustainability of their operations and deliver the best possible education.
The group first met in May 2025, using their respective results in an open dialogue to probe operational differences, asking the questions, “Where are we different, and why are we different?” in order to provide context and uncover best practice. It’s early days, but Senga acknowledges the impact of this facilitated, evidence-based deepening collaboration with peer colleges.
“I’ve no doubt it will be of significant value to us all and we’ll go deeper at the next collaborative forum to hopefully uncover more.”
Given the Scottish Colleges Finance Directors network as a group have often shown themselves to be very good at collaborating, the intent and opportunity to realise future value from collaborative benchmarking is plain.
Lessons for the Sector
For other finance teams, Senga’s recommendation is clear:
“Data is king, isn’t it? It’s hard to make the kinds of decisions that are having to be made now – we’re impacting people’s lives, people’s futures - you cannot do that without proper robust data. The more colleges that participate, the more beneficial it is for the sector.”
Summary
Forth Valley’s experience demonstrates:
- Benchmarking delivers both internal focus and external credibility for finance leaders.
- Collaborative working has clear benefits, whether in sharing operational insights or building sector-wide business cases.
- Objective, robust data supports not just better decisions but also protects both the institution and individuals when making hard choices.
- As the funding climate tightens, Senga’s message for counterparts across the UK is both pragmatic and optimistic: “It’s hard to make the kinds of decisions we have to make now without meaningful data...we are stronger and more effective working together.”
If you would like to understand how Etio's Performance Benchmarking can support your organisation or group's collaboration projects, please get in touch with Phil Moseley and the Benchmarking team here.
