The Office of the Auditor General released two audit reports today on budget management by BC schools and post-secondary institutions.
Carol Bellringer had mostly positive things to say about budget management and monitoring by BC’s school districts. However, she stressed that the audit was not comprehensive.
“Because we only looked at a small sample of school districts we can’t generalize our findings to the whole public education system. However, we believe that all school districts could benefit from our 8 recommendations.”
Six of those recommendations are aimed at BC’s school districts and focus on three main areas:
- Better development and communication of strategic plans;
- Better reporting to school boards around district financial performance; and
- Stronger budgetary and expenditure controls.
“Districts could do more to communicate their strategic plans to stakeholders and better link their budget decisions to their goals and outcomes,” says Bellringer. “They could also provide more information to their school boards so that trustees can make the best decisions possible.”
In order to help school districts adopt the recommendations, Bellringer says her office has put together an assessment tool.
“We provide a list of 20 questions based on good practice principles for the school trustees to discuss with district management. This should help them assess the state of their budget development and expenditure monitoring and identify any areas of improvement.”
Bellringer hopes all of BC’s school districts will use the assessment tool, which is available in the report.
Two of the report’s recommendations suggest that the Ministry of Education communicate its strategic priorities more effectively and do a better job evaluating the success of its strategic planning goals.
The report on school budgets comes at a tense time. School districts across the province say they’re struggling to balance their budgets in the face of substantial cuts imposed by the province. School District 57 Prince George needs to cut $1.35 million from its administration budget. The Vancouver School Board recently refused to approve a balanced budget for this year, saying proposed cuts are too deep.
Bellringer refused to comment on the issue.
“At the end of the day, there’s still going to be a political discussion around the funding level. We cannot comment on the merit of policy.”
Her office’s second report found that post-secondary institutions in BC are also doing a good job when it comes to managing the upkeep and construction of campus buildings. Bellringer’s office looked at eight significant building projects, with a budget between $20 and $50 million and found that overall, the projects met both budget and construction goals. British Columbia’s colleges and universities spend about $700 million every year on maintenance and construction.
Bellringer said the response to the two audits has been encouraging.
“Byt the time the teams had completed both of these audits, the ministries, post-secondary institutions and school boards were already addressing or had completed our recommendations for improvement.”
You can get the full reports on the Auditor General’s website.
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