OCW's housekeeping booklet of school boards: a leaflet
Anyone who wants to see the income and expenditure of educational institutions with a few clicks can visit a new website launched by the Ministry of Education today. A handy tool, provided you know the limitations.
The dashboards contains no new information, but serves as an addition to the existing databases (see below for useful sources). The website aims to make all public data more easily accessible. That is to say: part of the data, because for the time being the site only contains what OCW calls the 'housekeeping book' of educational institutions: income and expenditure.
For the sake of clarity, a distinction is made with colors between expenditure on personnel and equipment. The dashboard should give teachers, parents and participation councils a helping hand to 'enter into dialogue' with the school board about the financial choices, according to OCW. The ministry sees the dashboard presented today as a first step.
The dashboard should help teachers, parents and participation councils to 'enter into dialogue' with the school board about the financial choices
Annual result
It is also important to know the limitations of the new site. For example, the dashboard presents the difference between income and expenditure, prominently at the top of the overview. Useful. But it is good to realize: that is not the institution's actual annual result. This is because, among other things, the financial income and expenses (including interest income and expenses) have been omitted by OCW.
For example, the Meer Primair foundation in Hoofddorp appears in the dashboard as plus 251 thousand euros in 2016, while the operating result was a hundred thousand euros higher. And in 2012 the dashboard shows a deficit of 2500 euros, while the foundation had 4,5 euros left under the line. For larger institutions, these differences can run into millions of euros. At Roc West Brabant, the OCW dashboard shows a balance of plus 1,9 million euros, while the annual result was plus XNUMX million euros.
The website provides absolutely no information about the debts and reserves of educational institutions.
The website provides no information at all about the debts and reserves of educational institutions. The balance sheet, which helps to put income and expenditure into perspective, is missing. Information that would come in handy to ask critical questions: does a school board spend relatively little on staff, but does it have a solid buffer? Or does the board spend too much and have few reserves in reserve? This data is also already public via DUO, but the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science chooses to only add this information 'at a later stage'. Parliamentary questions have recently been asked several times about reserves of school boards and partnerships, such as very recent yet.
Clarification
All figures say that they say little without explanation. That context is currently missing from the dashboard. It is up to the school board to provide this explanation itself if teachers or parents ask for it, according to OCW. The most extensive interpretation is given by each school board in the management report and the annual accounts. But institutions are still not legally required to disclose these documents. OCW is working on a bill to regulate this by law, if possible with effect from next year. In healthcare, full annual accounts have long been available on a government database.
Four tips
Fortunately, a fair amount of information is available through DUO. Below is a brief overview of financial statements about educational institutions for both the concerned outsider and the advanced data fanatic:
1.DUO: Financial data per board
A PDF file per education sector (primary, secondary, mbo, hbo, wo) clearly presents all financial key figures of the last five years on one A-4 sheet per school board: profit/loss account including the actual result, balance sheet including debts and reserves, investments and key figures. Extra useful is a whole series of ratios that compare the institution with other school boards, such as expenditure on staff compared to the government grant.
2.DUO: Data books
Contains overviews of key figures for the annual results, cash and cash equivalents and the financial position of all school boards per education sector.
3.DUO: Financial responsibility
Those who are not afraid of Excel will find on this page a large amount of financial data per school board over the last five years. These are the most comprehensive annual financial files publicly available. They provide a detailed view of all income and expenditure, broken down into all kinds of sub-items. The data is supplied digitally by the institutions themselves on the basis of the adopted annual accounts. What is missing is an explanation of the figures. For that, you have to put the management report next to it. If you are still working with Excel: DUO also has a lot of information about it staffing, student numbers and funding put online.
4.DUO: Setting information
Exactly how much money does a school board receive per school (brin number), and how are these government contributions broken down into personnel and material contributions? Digital overviews of the funding and PDFs of the underlying decisions can be requested via a search form. For a while there have also been collection files payments en decisions download.
