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The Balancing Act of Education and Finance
It’s not headline news that schools and Trusts face ongoing pressure to deliver outstanding academic results while managing financial sustainability.
The challenge of balancing quality education with tight budgets is ever present and requires a coordinated approach that leads to decisions on education and finances being taken together. That’s why Integrated Curriculum Financial Planning (ICFP) is now becoming an increasingly vital tool across our sector.
What ICFP Offers
By focussing on the interplay between curriculum delivery and financial management, this approach helps schools and Trusts maximise the impact of their budgets, ensure appropriate and sustainable staffing levels, reduce inefficiencies in resource allocation and confidently plan for different financial and operational scenarios.
Implementation Requires Insight
While the concept of ICFP may seem straightforward, effective implementation requires a deep understanding of both educational priorities and financial planning intricacies.
Expert consultancy makes a significant difference here but there are some broad principles and best practice that school leaders should follow to ensure that they adopt this holistic approach and make their implementation of ICFP as effective as possible.
Five Steps to Adopting a Holistic ICFP Approach
1) Commit to the process and ensure the right people from across the Trust are involved and on board from the beginning. Communicating the benefits and key steps at this early stage will help you to bring people on board and get them focused on the mission.
2) Establish the facts. Agree the current position and known facts to calculate baseline ICFP metrics which, alongside context, help to assess existing quantity, quality and effectiveness.
3) Factor in the unexpected. Agree financial and educational assumptions and consider more than one possible scenario alongside risks and opportunities.
4) Look ahead. Identify and formulate a high-level plan for the next three to five years that meets the needs of pupils and is financially affordable. Budget planning software can help you to do this.
5) Review regularly. Review the plan at least annually, and more regularly if possible. There may be government funding and policy changes that will affect your course, so a more frequent review cycle is preferable. Try to horizon scan and if necessary, feed potential changes into your planning assumptions.
Support and Resources
The Department for Education has some useful online guidance on its website, setting out in more detail the benefits of ICFP, getting started, common steps, training and tools.
Embedding ICFP for Long-term Impact
There are good reasons why ICFP is becoming a commonplace approach in trusts across the country, but it’s clear that for it to be truly transformative it needs to be thoroughly embedded into a Trust’s operations – and bought into and understood at every level.
Authored by Kelly Crawford
Finance Service Lead
Kelly is a CIMA-qualified accountant and former MAT CFO who joined School Business Services in 2022 as a Senior Finance Consultant. In this role, she helped clients streamline financial processes and produce accurate financial information to support decision-making.
Connect with Kelly Crawford
Kelly Crawford of School Business Services on the opportunities Integrated Curriculum Financial Planning can provide Trusts – if they take a more holistic view.
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