Balanced Scorecard Use in School

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Balanced Scorecard is widely applied not only in commercial organizations, but also in non profit and educational sector. Read this article to learn more about school BSC and how this system is used in educational organizations. Check additional information about balanced scorecard use in school.

There is a myth that Balanced Scorecard is used only in commercial and business organizations. Well, this is partially true. Initially, Balanced Scorecard was designed for companies that want to gain competitive advantage through continuous improvement of performance, correct strategic goal setting, as well as correct evaluation of company progress on the way to achieve strategic goals. However, in course of time non profit, government and educational organizations decided to use experience of commercial businesses in implementation of Balanced Scorecard. Indeed, the system perfectly works for non profit organizations. Instead of generating profits public and government bodies focus on rational use of taxpayers' money, donations etc. The rest categories of non profit Balanced Scorecard are pretty much the same as compared to commercial BSC. In this article will talk about Balanced Scorecard in schools.

Although school to not have a primary goal of making money (although many colleges and universities do generate massive profits by enrolling a larger number of students), the funds should be spent efficiently. Besides, there are a number of internal processes in schools that have to be improved. At the same time there are many factors and indicators demonstrating efficiency and popularity of school with public. Let's analyze if you indicators and perspectives in educational Balanced Scorecard.

First and foremost, any school or any higher educational establishment needs to calculate cost per student. Logically, every school spends certain amount of money to educate one student. Here we can differentiate academic and non academic costs. To non academic costs we refer school building maintenance costs, electricity and other bills etc. Academic costs mainly cover salaries for teaching school personnel. Optimization of this indicator will lead to cost savings which is very important for school as a non commercial organization.

Besides, it is very important to evaluate such KPI as percentage of budget spent on development of departments and units of a school. This indicator shows progress in school development. Obviously, a school cannot work with the same chemistry or tech lab for 10 or 20 years. Positive dynamics in this indicator will most certainly signal about efficiency of school management.

Quality of education can be also measured with graduation and further admission degree. It would be very interesting to know how many students failed to graduate due to various reasons. It would be also important to learn how many students went to college after school. Moreover, this number can be split into 3 categories: those who were admitted, those who were rejected because of poor grades, and those who never wanted to go to college. Analysis of these figures will help school management locate problems and work for success in the long term. For example, if school leavers fail to be admitted to college because of problems with essay writing or natural sciences than school management should pay a special attention to these areas.

The goal of Balanced Scorecard implementation in a school is to make sure that the money allocated by local and Federal government is used efficiently, and the school is continuously developing in terms of education quality.

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