The first time I encountered the idea of a false economy, consciously that is, I was a design student working on a group project. We were building a prototype—a simple table—and I suggested, to save on materials, using a cheaper glue from Pricebusters.
This glue, I proclaimed, held all sorts of things together in our student house. And it held our simple table together, too—until it didn’t. Moments before we presented it to our tutors, it collapsed. I remember running back over to the now-demolished shopping centre in Elephant & Castle to buy a hammer and some nails before hastily hacking it back together to spare our my blushes.
Later, studying economics, I saw the same logic with more maths: the danger of ignoring opportunity cost or mistaking short-term cuts for long-term efficiency.
Anyway, all that to say: I’ve been burnt, it’s on my mind a lot, it’s a pattern I seek out.
The hidden cost of doing it all
Earlier this week, I was in a room full of serving and aspiring headteachers. They are some of my most favourite people working in education today—brilliant, brave, generous people—and we found ourselves talking about time. More specifically, how little of it they had.
One head mentioned that they didn’t have a PA because it felt like a luxury. Another nodded: “I wouldn’t feel right asking for one.” A third said they’d had one in a previous job but wouldn’t dream of it now.
I get it. School budgets are brutal, and every pound spent on an adult feels like a pound not spent on a child. But I found myself wondering, mischievously initially: what does it cost them to not have a PA?
Because the work that a PA (or EA) would do doesn’t disappear. It just gets done by someone else, on top of everything else they have to do. The work flows somewhere else: in this instance, it flows uphill onto the desk of a senior leader whose time is significantly more expensive and whose expertise is in other areas. Sorting diaries, chasing forms, rewriting letters, and triaging inboxes—all of it quietly eating away at the time and focus they need for the work only they can do.
It feels like a saving. But it’s not. It’s a hidden cost.
The fallacy of frugality
There are decisions in schools that feel morally sound and fiscally responsible. We cut something that sounds peripheral—branding, comms, admin support—and we redirect the funds into something that sounds essential. But these choices often hide a deeper cost.
Take communications, for example. In many schools, there’s a quiet pride in designing the prospectus in-house, someone in the office running the social media account from their phone, or cobbling together a website using tried and tested templates. It feels like the right thing to do: avoid the flash, keep things lean—prove that you're here for the kids, not the optics.
But what if our reluctance to invest in communications, to take one example, is actually costing us?
What if our messaging—or even just the language we use—is putting off the very families we most want to reach?
What if our visual identity signals something off-putting before a parent or prospective student even steps through the door?
What if potential staff don’t apply to join a school—not because of the job, but because we failed to tell the story of what’s so special (and so hard) about working there?
In the middle of a deepening recruitment and retention crisis, we know that schools can’t afford to be vague or forgettable. It’s a seller’s market. Talented teachers have options. If we want the right people to join us (and stay!) we need to be able to explain what we stand for, what makes us different, and what it’s actually like to work here.
And it’s not just staff. A strong school brand matters to students, too—especially in secondary and post-16. It’s part of how young people decide where they feel they belong.
I distinctly remember how cool I thought the Filton College branding (and its new campus) was in the mid-2000s. Everything about it—from the prospectus to the kit—screamed, “We are elite athletes and performers.”
I wanted to be a part of that. I didn’t go there in the end, but I still remember how it made me feel. That stuff mattered to me.
These things are hard to measure, so we often don’t try. And yet they shape how we’re perceived by our community, our prospective staff, and our students. Good branding isn’t spin. Done well, it’s just honest, coherent storytelling. It takes time and skill to do it well.
Again, it feels like a saving. But it’s not. It’s a false economy.
A different kind of discipline
There’s something honourable about the frugality that runs through our profession. It comes from a good place: a desire to do the most for children with the least for ourselves. But, that discipline, when taken too far, can become counterproductive.
This isn’t actually about PAs or communications support really. Rather, it’s a concern that we say no to things that would make our work more efficient, more strategic or more sustainable because we’ve internalised the idea that spending on ourselves is indulgent. But that logic, if followed to its end, leaves schools brittle, leaders exhausted, and opportunities missed.
We’re not alone in this. The NHS has often done the same—cutting administrative or preventative services to protect frontline care, only to find that inefficiencies and crises downstream cost far more. Charities, too, routinely underinvest in operations, strategy, and comms to keep overheads low, even though the most effective organisations are often the ones with robust infrastructure behind the scenes. Even tech start-ups—famed for innovation—have learned the hard way that skimping on things like customer service or internal tools in the early stages can stunt growth later on.
It’s a pattern: when systems prioritise short-term optics over long-term capacity, they become less resilient. The cost of doing without is rarely zero. Some costs are visible. Others are merely felt in slower progress, strained relationships, and diminished clarity. The discipline we need now isn’t about saying no to everything. It’s about learning to see the difference between a real saving and a false economy.
A real story from another sector
When Greg Jackson founded Octopus Energy, he didn’t start by slashing costs. In fact, he invested heavily in back-end operations and support staff before most would have considered it viable. Critics thought it extravagant for a start-up in a cut-throat industry.
But Jackson saw something else: every clunky process was a drag on staff time, customer experience, and brand trust. By investing in clean design, automation, and the right people early on, the company avoided the trap of building on broken systems. Today, Octopus is one of the UK’s fastest-growing energy firms, known for customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.1
Different sector, different scale. But the logic holds. Spending wisely early, especially on the “invisible” things that enable clarity and focus, can pay back many times over.
It didn’t fix everything. But it made the work better, cleaner, more doable. And that was enough.
Seeing clearly
School leaders don’t need more pressure to do the impossible with less. What they need is the clarity to spot a false economy when they see one and the courage and support to call it out and act accordingly. Sometimes, the smartest thing to do will be to stop doing it all yourself.
I found this Masters of Scale podcast pretty interesting btw: https://mastersofscale.com/how-to-grow-a-greener-energy-grid/