Seeking business managers

28th November 2025 by Timo Hannay [link]

One of the benefits of entering an artificial-intelligence boom after having analysed secondary school recruitment adverts for more than eight years is that we can take our historic cache of millions of web pages and re-interrogate them using the latest technology. To date (see our April, July and October 2025 reports for recent examples), we have focused on teacher and technician positions, which we monitor in real time as they appear – and publish every week to SchoolDash Insights. Although we have kept all of the web pages that we analysed over that time, the task of reanalysing them in any depth has been far too onerous to contemplate seriously. But with the recent rise of large language models (LLMs), that situation has changed: it's is now quite feasible to analyse millions of pages of text in sophisticated ways that approach or exceed the accuracy of human experts, and to do so quickly (hours rather than months) and cheaply (£100s rather than £100,000s).

In this report, we use such an approach to analyse trends in school business manager (SBM) recruitment between January 2020 and September 2025. In summary, we find that:

• Adverts for SBM positions at secondary schools in England slumped during the pandemic and spiked immediately afterwards before returning to pre-pandemic levels. Over the last two years, however, they have been in steady decline and are now below mid-pandemic levels. This is broadly in line with the overall school recruitment trends that we have reported previously.
• Proportions of temporary and part-time positions have not changed greatly over that period, but the proportion of term-time-only roles appear to have risen sharply in 2024 and 2025.
• Average salaries on offer declined during the pandemic, and have since risen slightly, but have not kept track with the overall rate of inflation during the period studied.
• These research methods potentially allow us to understand many other trends across the full range of school roles over many years, covering pre-, mid- and post-pandemic periods.

To find out more, read on.

Mentionables

To begin with, we will look at the results of a simple keyword search across our archive of secondary-school web pages, which were gathered every weekday since January 2020 (almost 9 million in total). The raw content is composed mainly (>90%) of school vacancy pages, though in some cases school websites mix this content with other information, such as current staff lists; a few put vacancies on their home pages.

Figure 1 shows the proportions of these pages in which we found the terms "business manager" or "SBM". This is not the same as finding a vacancy advert, but given the nature of the pages cached, it provides a useful indicator of putative recruitment activity.

Historically, about 5-6% of secondary-school website recruiting pages mentioned SBMs. There was a decline during the pandemic, followed by a large spike afterwards. Things then settled down to more or less normal levels in 2023, but have been in decline since 2024 and are now even lower than during the pandemic. All of this is broadly in line with most (but not all) secondary-school recruiting trends over the same period. It is also interesting to observe that how little seasonality there is compared to teachers and SENCOs.

(Hover over the graph to see corresponding values.)

Let us count the ads

How does this relate to the numbers of actual vacancy adverts for SBMs, as opposed to mere mentions of them? To examine this, we extracted a subset of cached pages in which there was a mention of "business manager" or "SBM" that had not appeared at the same URL the previous day, or for 28 days before that. In other words, these were new appearances of those terms. We then fed the text content of these pages (over 4,000 in total) into an LLM – specifically, OpenAI GPT-5 mini – with instructions to determine whether or not the page contained an actual SBM vacancy advert. This identified just over 1,700 adverts.

Given this relatively small number (at least compared to teachers and even technicians), the SBM advert count tends to fluctuate a lot from month to month. It is therefore more informative to look at annual totals, which are shown in Figure 2. Here, too, we see a rise in the post-pandemic years of 2021 and 2022, followed by a long-term decline since that time. Note that the count for 2025 includes only January to September, but the period from October to December is a low season for school recruitment, so we expect to the full year for 2025 to come in below 2024. Though there are differences between the pattern seen in the monthly keyword-search results in Figure 1 and the LLM-assisted annual advert counts in Figure 2, the long-term trend of post-pandemic peak followed by more recent continual decline is consistent across them both.

(Click on the legend to turn lines on or off; double-click to show a line on its own. Hover over the graph to see corresponding values.)

Typology

In addition to having the LLM determine whether or not an advert was present, we also instructed it to record various characteristics of the postion where specified. These results are shown in Figure 3.

Note that the absolute proportions reported are almost certainly vast underestimates since we are including only positions for which these characteristics were specified on the vacancies page visited during our web-crawling process. Often such details are mentioned only on separate, more detailed job descriptions that were either omitted from our index or not published online. It is the changes in these proportions that are potentially informative.

Maternity-cover, fixed-term and part-time positions remained broadly consistent over the period. In contrast, the proportions of term-time-only positions appears to have risen markedly in 2024 and 2025. The underlying sample sizes are small (see notes below the figure for details), but the differences between 2024-25 and the period preceding it are nevertheless statistically significant (p < 0.01) and the adverts in question came from a variety of apparently unaffiliated schools, so this would seem to be a real effect.

(Click on the legend to turn lines on or off; double-click to show a line on its own. Hover over the graph to see corresponding values.)

Salary stats

The LLM was further instructed to extract gross salary details where these were included and expressed in cash terms. To allow for the fact that some postions were part-time, it also converted these into FTE salary values. The results are shown in Figure 4.

These show a dip during and in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, followed by a period of growth between 2022 and 2023 (perhaps reflecting the exceptionally high inflation rate at that time), before levelling off in more recent years. The larger gap between actual and FTE salaries in 2024 and 2025 is reflective of the higher proportions of part-time (including term-time-only) positions on offer during those years.

Note that these are nominal salaries without any allowance made for the effects of inflation. They grew at a compound rate of a little over 2% a year from 2020 to 2025, which is well below the rate of annual consumer inflation over the same period (around 4%). In other words, these average salary figures show a real-terms decline. Of course, it should also be borne in mind that these are offered salaries, which may differ from the real salaries eventually agreed upon appointing a new SBM.

(Click on the legend to turn lines on or off; double-click to show a line on its own. Hover over the graph to see corresponding values.)

Lean Lexical Miner

As well as providing some insights into SBM recruitment trends among secondary schools in England, we hope that this brief analysis provides a useful case study in applying LLMs and related technologies to large-scale, retrospective analyses that would have been completely infeasible just two or three years ago. We believe that over the coming years such approaches will transform research methods in education and beyond.

We welcome your feedback. Please write to us: [email protected].