Michael Hewstone has spent a decade working across schools in finance, operations, and business management. His debut book, written with Authors & Co, is designed to do something the sector has long needed: make school finance genuinely accessible to the headteachers who are responsible for it but rarely trained in it. His wife and business partner Nadia Hewstone is a former headteacher and executive coach who wrote her own book with Authors & Co several years ago – a book that, by her own account, transformed the trajectory of their coaching company Destino. We sat down with both of them to talk about the books, the business, and what they both want to see change in how schools are led.
A Q&A with Michael Hewstone
You have worked as a school business manager, operations manager, and finance manager across multiple schools. What is the single biggest mistake you see headteachers making when it comes to their school finances – and is it what most people would assume?
The single biggest mistake is the spending that happens continuously in schools and simply does not get questioned. Money gets committed year after year to the same things, and nobody stops to ask whether it is actually working – for the pupils, for the staff, for the school community. There is a good reason for that. Schools are reactive places. The day-to-day can be so operational and hectic that school leaders genuinely do not have the time or the headspace to look deeply and make those decisions.
As for what people would assume the biggest mistake to be – most people would say it is a lack of knowledge. But I do not think that is quite right. I think what is actually happening is a lack of confidence to use the knowledge that is there. And that can make things very tricky.
In your book you talk about creating a healthy financial culture in a school. What does that actually look like in practice, and why do so many schools get this wrong?
Schools that have a healthy financial culture tend to have several things in common, and most of them come down to two things. The first is being genuinely strategic and forward-thinking about investment – whether that is curriculum, staffing, or premises – being clear about what you are spending, why you are spending it, and what you expect it to achieve. And then measuring the results to make sure the money actually did what it was intended to do.
The second is understanding that school money is public money. It is taxpayers’ money. That comes with a real responsibility – a level of care around how it is spent and the benefits it produces for young people that is different from the commercial sector. When schools lose sight of that, the financial culture suffers.
Many headteachers tell us they feel anxious about finance conversations, particularly in governance meetings. What is driving that anxiety, and what is the quickest way to start building more confidence?
Teachers rightly spend their careers focused on teaching and learning, on the classroom, on how young people develop and achieve. That is their expertise and it should be. But the transition from classroom teacher to school leader does not always come with training in the other things that really matter at that level – including financial management.
So there can be a genuine knowledge gap, and that leads to a confidence gap. Add to that the scrutiny headteachers are under – reporting upwards to the DFE, to Ofsted, to local authorities, to multi-academy trusts, to governors, to parents – and the anxiety is entirely understandable. The book is really trying to break the subject down, make it accessible, and give headteachers a way to quietly build their understanding at their own pace.
You describe your work as demystifying school finance and removing jargon. What is a piece of jargon or finance concept that headteachers genuinely find confusing, and how do you explain it in plain language?
One of the biggest areas of confusion I have come across is around in-year positions, closing balances, and opening balances. There can be a lot of fog around what those terms actually mean in practice. The way I explain it is as simple as I can make it: the money in the bank at the start of the year is affected by what happens during the year, and that determines how much is left in the bank at the end of the year. Keep it that simple.
I have seen finance experts who take pride in their knowledge but do not share it – who use complexity as a kind of currency. I think that does headteachers a real disservice. My job is to share knowledge in a way that actually helps them and makes their role easier to do.
How should a headteacher think about working with their school finance leader? What does an effective partnership look like, and what are the red flags that things are not working?
Frequent, clear communication is the most important thing – and it is harder than it sounds, because school leaders naturally gravitate towards teaching and learning, and rightly so. But there needs to be protected space for genuinely strategic conversations about finance: what needs to happen, what the spending decisions are, what the longer-term picture looks like.
That means regular meetings, focused agendas, and real engagement – not going through the motions, but being genuinely interested, because it is the best way to make the best investment decisions for the school and for young people. The biggest red flags are the absence of those things: unclear communication and not meeting often enough.
Long-term strategic financial planning sounds important but also quite abstract when you are managing daily pressures. How do you help headteachers balance both?
It is genuinely tricky, and the honest answer is that the role veers between being totally reactive and less reactive at different points in the year. The best approach I have seen is trying to separate the operational from the strategic – through meeting structures, through how time is used in the week — because it is very hard to think about the next three years when your brain is in operational mode and caught up in the day-to-day.
I have also seen real benefit for headteachers who make time for coaching, because coaching creates a designated, safe space for thinking about solutions, change, and growth. It can genuinely shift a mindset and change how someone thinks about what is possible for their school.
What is the one thing you wish every headteacher understood about their school budget that would actually change how they lead?
That the school is dynamic. The community changes, the needs of the pupils change, the numbers change. And every time there is significant change in the school – in the community, the staff, the pupils – the budget needs to be looked at forensically to make sure the investment genuinely reflects those changed needs. That is how schools make the best of a difficult situation with reduced funding and rising costs.
Who needs this book? Is it for headteachers already in trouble, or is it more of a preventative guide?
Headteachers exist on a really broad spectrum when it comes to finance. Some are very adept at it. Some have strong teams and can operate in a fairly hands-off way. Others have neither the skills within the building nor the external support to manage it well.
I hope this book has something in it for all of them – for building knowledge, for building confidence, for giving a window into things they may not have considered. But it is particularly aimed at headteachers who are new to the role and at senior leaders who are aspiring to headship, because we frequently see people entering these roles with no guidance, no training, and no basic grounding in school finance. That is a real disservice to them, and I hope this book can be an important tool for changing that.
You brought this book to life with Authors & Co. How have you found the process – and what surprised you most?
It is a challenge, and I will not pretend otherwise. My thinking is normally data-driven and analytical, and shifting into writing mode takes real effort. I had to carve out time outside of normal life and be disciplined about it.
What surprised me most was how the process made me question things I thought I knew. When you are putting something into print, you suddenly find yourself wondering: is that a fact, or have I just been told that? Is that still accurate? Writing a book forces you to do the research, to verify, and in a couple of cases I found things I had been saying for years that turned out to be out of date. That process of interrogating your own expertise is genuinely valuable.
As for working with Authors & Co – stimulating, thought-provoking, and much better structured than I expected. I like a plan, I like organisation, and the clear project structure worked really well. Seeing the finished book – the quality of it, how it looks and feels – made everything worthwhile. I said halfway through that I would never write another book. I may have spoken too soon.
Nadia Hewstone Co-Founder of Destino and previous Authors & Co client enters the conversation…
Your books tackle headship from quite different but complementary angles – Michael on the operational and financial side, Nadia on the strategic leadership and relationships side. How do you see them working together?
Nadia: What we do is help headteachers find ways to remain focused on strategic priorities – which is the central challenge in headship. Michael does the nuts and bolts of things that are genuinely tricky and frightening for headteachers, because finance is not how teachers are brought up and the accountability around it is high. His calm, knowledgeable background in operational school leadership helps headteachers feel more in control. Where I come in is the lived daily experience of being a headteacher — the emotions, the stakeholder management, the relationships. If you want to change how money is spent, you are going to come up against parents, your governing board, your staff. Navigating those relationships so that the financial intervention does not create resistance — that is the leadership coaching side. Together the books give headteachers both.
Beyond the books, you are working together through Destino Coaching. What is your shared vision for headteachers?
Nadia: For me it is about headteachers having more say in shaping educational policy. It is very much a done-to role. Headteachers are given the national curriculum, the Ofsted framework, the attendance strategy, and then expected to own them publicly – even when they do not agree with them. That is very difficult to be authentic about. Where headship would really fly is if those on the ground, who best understand their school and their community, had more genuine influence in how schools are shaped.
Michael: We need to be careful not to be too prescriptive about what a headteacher must look like. Leaders come in different shapes, sizes, and backgrounds. The coaching perspective is about understanding and developing the person on the ground – who genuinely knows their context better than anyone – rather than putting structures around them that make decisions for them.
Nadia: Representation matters too. I delivered a keynote at a secondary headteachers conference and every single person in the audience was a white male – a whole county of secondary schools represented. There is a lot of work to do in making headship more accessible, particularly at secondary level, to people who are very talented but have not seen themselves reflected in the role.
Where is Destino heading right now, and how do the books fit into that?
Nadia: We had to learn something important: people were buying me, not Destino. The book I wrote with Authors & Co a few years ago was a huge part of what built my positioning – most of our new referrals still come to Destino because someone has read a copy of my book. When Michael joined the business full-time, we realised we had to pivot from being all about Nadia to being Destino by Nadia and Michael together.
We looked at what had actually moved the dial for the business, and the book kept coming up as the thing that added value, built trust, and got people genuinely interested. So it made complete sense to do another book – on one of the areas headteachers come to us and say they really struggle with. The books are at the foundation of the coaching work, and together they give us a broader, more credible, more scalable offer. That is where Destino is heading.
Authors & Co is a UK hybrid publisher for nonfiction books. Founded by Abigail Horne in 2017, we help founders, leaders, and experts write and publish books that work strategically. Over 700 authors, 50+ countries.
