Does anyone work as a Bursar in a state primary school?

[sinkingfast]

If so, can you tell me how qualified you are? There's some jobs I really want to apply for, but am wondering if I'm being unrealistic as I'm not a qualified accountant. Also, could you give me a rundown of what your job entails?

Thanks very much!

The bursar at my school is very experienced and does the finances for a number of primary schools. I don't know how big your school is, but ours has a budget of over 7 figures, so it is a pretty serious position in terms of responsibility.

I've done some book-keeping in the past and admin for a IFA, but wouldn't apply for a bursar job. I would expect applicants to have a serious track record in financial admin, maybe an AAT qualification; but it wouldn't be reasonable to expect them to be qualified accountants.

Do you know how efficiently the job has been handled recently? ie is everything under control or is there a possibility it might be in a bit of a mess?

HTH

Thanks Roisin, it's not a very big primary (less than 200 pupils) so I don't know how big that budget would be. I'm a part-qualified AAT, so not a complete novice, but don't know whether I'm being unrealistic even thinking about it tbh.

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I'm not a bursar either but I am on the finance committee of the school governors and we have a 7 figure budget for a school of 360 children. I would guess for a school of just under 200 children it would be about £600k ish.

The bursar at this school is also on the finance committee of the governors and does all the budgetting and forecasting. She works very closely with the head so it isn't a case of making a huge number of decisions. Also about 60 -70% of the budget is salaries which I presume are administered from the LEA.

I would have thought a part qualified AAT heading towards qualification could do the job. Not somebody who is just starting out. There are concepts like accruals, contingencies and prepayments that make it more than counting money in and counting money out and related to these, there are also a lot of LEA rules on how schools can manage budgets but I assume you could be sent on a training course for those.

I am AAT qualified by the way.

Of course, another indicator of whether you are capable of doing the job is to look at the salary they are offering. Is it a fully qualified accountant's salary?

Thanks Niecie, no it's about 19K, so I would guess at not fully qualified but not a novice in this area.

It would seem that if the Head is quite hands on, then I could probably do it, but if they want someone that they can just leave to it, then I'm not the right person maybe. Hmm, will have a think.

Oh go on, take a chance and apply. You might be able to do it easily but you won't know unless you go and find out what is involved. You have nothing to lose.

One other small point though - if you need more experience to qualify, would this be compromised by not working with another accountant who could vouch for your training so to speak. (I qualified a long time ago and have been a SAHM for ages so I don't know what the current rules are).

I think I will . I've just read the job description for a similar job in another school and there's nothing in there that I couldn't do (and re the budgeting/forecasting, it was all "in conjunction with the Head") and no mention of formal qualifications. I'm just waiting for the official job description to come out now...