View my financial insights

The View my financial insights (VMFI) tool, an insights tool offering information on the financial position and performance of schools, is now available for maintained schools.

What does VMFI do?

The VMFI tool provides users with rapid insights into the financial position and performance of their school. It does this by providing an automated assessment of the greatest areas for potential resource management, linked with relevant guidance and resources, providing access to a set of resources tailored to each school. The assessment is calculated by comparing each school’s data with 30 most statistically similar schools, either based on pupil characteristics, or building characteristics (its comparator groups). VMFI also enables local authorities to see this for all of their maintained schools in one place, as well as supporting in-depth analysis for individual schools. Maintained schools have been incorporated into VMFI with data from the Consistent Financial Reporting framework (CFR) for 2018/19 and 2019/20.

The key features of the tool are:

Accessing VMFI

We initially launched VMFI to academies and, more recently, to local authorities using an identification system called IDAMS, which was already established in both sectors. However, we were aware that this was not the case for many maintained school staff, who more commonly use an identification system called DfE Sign In (DSI). We have now updated VMFI to allow maintained school staff to use their DSI account to view their data in VMFI and see comparisons with similar schools across the sector.

There are now two routes to access VMFI, depending on your organisation and your role. We would encourage you to share the section below with your maintained schools so that they can access VMFI.

DfE Sign In (DSI)

For staff working in individual maintained schools, we recommend using DfE Sign In (DSI). A DSI account will allow you to access various online educational services for the organisations you are associated with. This will allow you to view the full data for your own school.

To login or to create an account please visit https://services.signin.education.gov.uk/

After you have created a DfE Sign In account:

IDAMS

For staff within local authorities, we recommend using an IDAMS account to login to VMFI. If you do not already have an account, please see our step-by-step guide to setting up your account.

Please set up your account against the local authority organisation. Each local authority will have at least one person assigned as a super user. They can approve your account and assign you the relevant role. Guidance on how to request and approve role permissions can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/how-to-register-for-an-idams-account

Login to VMFI

Once your account has been set up, you will then be able to log into the tool at https://viewyourdata.education.gov.uk/