Guidance

College financial benchmarking tool: guidance

Updated 4 June 2025

Applies to England

The Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) closed on 31 March 2025. All activity has moved to the Department for Education (DfE). You should continue to follow this guidance.

DfE publishes a financial benchmarking tool to help further education college corporations, sixth-form college corporations and designated institutions (‘colleges’) compare their financial performance with others in the sector. Designated institutions are those institutions established or designated under the provisions of the Further and Higher Education Act 1992.

This document offers guidance on how to use the tool.

Overview

The college financial benchmarking tool is primarily for use by:

• college principals and accounting officers, chief executives and finance directors
• college governors as charity trustees

College external auditors and other professional advisors may also find the tool useful.

The tool uses information submitted to DfE by colleges in their finance records for the years:

• 2023 to 2024
• 2022 to 2023

Only fully completed and reviewed finance records submitted to DfE by 16 May 2025 have been included. We will publish an updated financial benchmarking tool later in the year to include additional finance records received.

Getting started

Due to the large file size, you should save the tool to a local drive to reduce the risk of any performance issues.

Once open, you should navigate to the ‘Start Here’ tab and follow these steps.

Step 1: Select the relevant college

Select the relevant college from the dropdown list.

Step 2: Select the relevant financial year

Select the relevant year – either current year or previous year.

Step 3: Select criteria for the benchmark population

Select which filters to apply to the benchmark population.

Selected colleges

Select up to 5 colleges for comparison, selecting ‘no’ for all college types and regions where you do not want any other college to be included.

College type

Select ‘yes’ from the dropdown where you want the college type to be included in the benchmark population.

Region

Select ‘yes’ from the dropdown where you want the region to be included in the benchmark population.

Income

Enter a minimum and a maximum income figure to be included in the benchmark population where you want to exclude very small or large colleges.

Once the relevant fields are complete, the tool will present a count of the number of colleges in the benchmark population.

Output reports

The tool gives a number of output reports.

Benchmarking reports

There are 5 benchmarking reports:

• income – information on income relative to learner numbers
• pay costs – information on pay costs relative to staff numbers
• non-pay costs – information on specific non-pay data, such as outsourcing of payroll and catering
• miscellaneous – information on the accounting officer’s salary, audit fees and pensions
• detailed comparison – comprehensive information on a line-by-line basis for all fields in the finance record

Trend analysis

There is 5-year trend data presented in table and chart format.

Underlying data

There are 2 sets of underlying data:

• benchmark population – includes colleges in the benchmark population when filtered for the criteria selected
• total population – includes all colleges with information for both the current year and previous year

Interpreting outputs

You should apply professional judgement in interpreting the outputs of the tool.

The ‘guidance’ tab in the tool sets out some important points to consider when interpreting results, including:

• benchmark measures
• data completeness
• data accuracy

You may want to produce iterative versions of the output reports based on different benchmark populations.

You may also want to:

• undertake additional benchmarking activity focusing on alternative comparator groups and additional datasets
• enhance benchmarking reports with a narrative understanding of the reasons behind any variances.

Reliance on the tool

The financial benchmarking tool reflects information submitted by colleges, for use by colleges. We do not validate or cleanse finance record data used in the tool. It is for you to judge whether the results obtained are reasonable and reliable. We are not responsible for any decisions or judgements made using the tool.

Feedback and data error

We are grateful for the feedback we receive to improve the benchmarking tool. If you have suggestions for future updates, or if you identify potentially inaccurate data, contact us through our customer help portal.