What's been happening this week at Schools Financial Services

Welcome back! SFS hope you had a restful summer break and are now ready to get back into the swing of things. Here are a few things that have happened since last term:

The Bank of England base rate has reduced to 0.25% from 5 August 2016; therefore the interest rate on loans taken out prior to December 2015 will be reduced to 0.75%. All loans taken out from December 2015 will be subject to an interest rate of 1.25%. Please see Kelsi for full loan scheme details.

As you may be aware KCC has for some time been paying interest at 1% on credit balances held by schools in the corporate bank account scheme with NatWest, and this rate will be cut to 0.75% from 1 October 2016. The decision to reduce the KCC rate has been made in the context of falling interest rates payable by the banks which is impacting the return KCC can earn on its invested cash.

Training Courses in October:

• Budget Monitoring for Academies using BPS and PSF 4 October
• Budget Monitoring for Academies 5 October
• FMS6 User Defined Reports for Kent Schools 10 October
• Embedding Finance in Your School Improvement Plan 2 12 October
• Financial Management and Controls (including FMS6 updates) 13 October
• FMS6 Healthcheck 13 October
• Improving the Quality of School's Monitoring 17 October

Check the events section on Kelsi and CPD Online for details of our upcoming training courses.

Read our third newsletter here.

Keep your eyes peeled for details of our new website and e-learning programme - coming soon!

Don't forget to follow us on Twitter for news, updates and info. We understand many Primary schools cannot access Twitter so we will still be using KELSI and eBulletins to communicate information in addition to Twitter.