Integrated Curriculum and Financial Planning (ICFP)
ICFP stands for integrated curriculum and financial planning. It helps schools use their resources as effectively and efficiently as possible by bringing together curriculum planning, staffing and financial management into one joined-up approach.
ICFP supports schools and trusts in reviewing how their resources are being used against their teaching and learning priorities. Using a simple set of metrics, it helps identify whether staffing, spending and curriculum delivery are balanced and sustainable.
It is designed to support collaborative decision-making across the leadership team, involving school business professionals, senior leaders and governors or trustees. Rather than being a response to financial difficulty, ICFP is a proactive way for schools to plan ahead, make informed decisions and use resources more effectively.
What is ICFP?
Why is it important?
ICFP is a way to review a school’s financial and resource management planning and use against its widest curriculum delivery aims. It helps integrate a school or trust’s teaching and learning ambitions with appropriate strategic consideration for the financial resources available.
It supports the school business professional to approach resource management in a holistic way within their school. It helps them to quantify the areas of inefficiency within a school, diagnose the causes and then enable informed and collaborative decision-making to ensure the school has effective resource management.
When implemented fully, ICFP can be used to provide the analytical evidence that will inform the medium-term strategic planning as well as the short-term operational management action planning and collaborative decision-making of school business professionals, senior school leaders and governors/trustees.
ISBL’s approach to ICFP has been developed through hands-on experience delivering the School Resource Management Adviser (SRMA) programme and in partnership with Andrew Hamilton.
We believe that fully embedding ICFP is key to effective financial management and strategic resource planning, so our approach is designed to be simple, practical and easy to use.
It uses essential balance, income and expenditure measures alongside 12 key staffing metrics to help schools assess how effectively their resources are being used. You can download a copy of ISBL’s approach document by clicking here.
These metrics support informed discussions between school business professionals, senior leaders, governors and trustees about the actions needed to maintain both educational quality and financial health.
Our Approach
ICFP Training
ASOT is an advanced tool designed to help school business professionals and/or other school leaders, in any setting, to calculate and interpret their own essential ICFP metrics and compare these against specific year and regional thresholds. The enhanced tool calculates the potential financial impact of inefficiencies and identifies possible causes as well as providing an assessment of structural root causes.