Understanding Strategic Risk Management in Academies and Further Education Colleges

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All academies and further education colleges face a range of uncertain internal and external factors that may affect the achievement of their objectives. This means that at the highest level, risk management must be closely aligned with the institution’s strategic objectives, ensuring that there is a clear focus on the significant risks that would prevent it from achieving its key aims.

It is the responsibility of the governing body to ensure that a positive risk management culture and common approach to the management of risk is established across the institution through the development, implementation and embedding of a formal, structured risk management process.

Effective risk management helps to minimise events which might result in financial losses, service disruption, bad publicity, threats to the safety or health of students and other stakeholders, or claims for compensation.

Risk management is not only about adverse events, it is also about ensuring that an academy or further education institution is in a position to minimise its lost opportunities.

For any organisation, risk can be defined as the uncertainty that an event or an action will adversely affect its ability to achieve its objectives and to execute successfully its strategies.

A risk management system must be concerned with looking at the measures in place to identify and manage key risks, and then recommending the actions that need to be taken to control those risks more effectively.

This publication examines the pivotal role of the governing body and of senior management and others in developing effective strategic risk management in an institution.

It sets out how to address key issues including developing a risk management policy statement, maintaining a risk register and ensuring that robust risk management is embedded across the institution.

The guide includes a series of practical examples showing how academies and colleges have addressed risk management in their own institutions, together with some examples from higher education where risk management is well established.

This publication is available in hard copy and online.

The digital, online version is available as both searchable HTML and a bookmarked downloadable PDF of the publication that can be shared throughout your organisation. Customers will need to register and login to CIPFA’s website to access the publication.

Details of licensing arrangements for other categories of purchaser, which includes those organisations operating shared service arrangements, are available from CIPFA’s Publications Department.