How Can ICFP Help You Make Your School or Trust More Efficient?

What is ICFP?

Integrated Curriculum and Financial Planning (ICFP) is a process that aligns your staffing, curriculum, and budget to ensure resources are being used in the most effective and sustainable way possible. At School Business Services, we’ve developed SBS ICFP, a cloud-based tool that brings this process to life by combining live financial, staffing, and curriculum data in one easy-to-use platform.

Scenario Modelling and Strategic Planning

You can model different scenarios — such as changes to staffing structures or curriculum delivery — to see the potential financial and operational impact before making decisions. This makes it easier to plan strategically, avoid surprises, and ensure your approach is sustainable in the long term.

What Sets SBS ICFP Apart?

What sets SBS ICFP apart is that it’s not just a tool — it benchmarks your Trust’s performance against data from over 20,000 schools. Filter by a range of criteria, including Local Authority, phase, pupil numbers and SEN percentage. The aim isn’t simply to make every indicator turn green, but to help you understand the story behind the numbers and make informed choices that reflect your school or Trust’s unique priorities and context.

Understanding the Metrics

Calculating your integrated and curriculum metrics is simple when you use SBS ICFP, but what do these metrics actually tell you?

It is often assumed that the aim of the ICFP process is to turn all your metrics green as this would imply that the school is efficiently organised. However, the reality is a little more complex than that. If all your metrics are green then what that is telling you is that your school is entirely typical or normative: you are allocating resources in the same way as the majority of schools in the country. However, not all schools are the same as they exist in different contexts and work with varying pupil cohorts. So, schools will, inevitably, use their resources differently.

Metrics as a Starting Point for Discussion

The metrics should be seen as starting points for further discussions by raising questions about how the school is currently allocating its resources leading to two crucial questions:

1. Do we know why we are using more or less of this resource?
2. If we can afford it then are we happy to continue in this way?

If we work through an example using one or two of the metrics that might help to illustrate the process.

Metric Examples: 

Let’s start with one of the balance metrics: the SLT as a percentage of total revenue income might flag up as a ‘red high’. This indicates that the school is planning to spend more on staff paid on the leadership spine than other similar schools. The school may know that this spend is high as, for instance, they have recruited key staff by paying them on the leadership spine and they are comfortable with that decision. The school would need to check three other metrics to be genuinely comfortable:

• Is the management cost as a percentage of total revenue income in balance because the TLR costs have been reduced to accommodate this increase?
• Is the total staff cost metric also in balance?
• Is the school setting a balanced budget?

This will help the school to ascertain whether their decision is affordable.

Let’s now turn to the curriculum metrics and consider what they may add to the discussion. If we consider the pupil teacher ratio metric first. If this flags up as low then that indicates that the school has more teachers in the school for the number of children on roll. If this is identified then it raises a number of issues, but comes back to these key ones:

1. Do we know why we have more teachers than similar schools?
2. Can we afford this and do we want it to continue?

If we work through an example again the school may know that they have appointed two teachers to do intervention with small groups throughout the school year. They may also know that this has had a massive impact on pupil outcomes and, because they can still set a balanced budget, they want to maintain this provision. However, if they don’t know why they have more teachers than similar schools then they would want to turn to the teacher contact ratio metric that looks at how effectively they are deploying their teachers to the curriculum. If this metric is low, then they would want to consider reducing the number of teachers to balance both of these metrics.

The Value of the Discussion

Calculating the metrics is the starting point. It is the discussion that follows that will really make a difference to both the effectiveness and the efficiency of your school.

SBS ICFP forces schools to ask whether we are the school we really want to be and, if we aren’t, then what do we need to do to become that school?

Contact us here if you would like to talk about implementing SBS ICFP within your school or Trust. We can also offer consultancy to help you get the most out of your tool.

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Authored by Peter Tompkins, Director at TSO Education.