ICFP Metrics – Now what?

Calculating the integrated curriculum and financial planning metrics are the easy part of the process, particularly when you use a tool like ICFP.school. The more difficult steps are the next ones:

What are the integrated curriculum and financial planning tools telling me about the school?

What actions can I now take to improve the efficiency of my school?

The ICFP.school tool helps with these next steps by providing suggested actions to take if your metric is above – or below – the benchmarked ranges and also offers the opportunity to speak to someone at TSO Education Ltd, an accredited SRMA, about your metrics.

One of the areas where integrated curriculum and financial planning is often misunderstood is the use of RAG ratings. It is often easy to assume that being rated GREEN is GOOD and RED is BAD. This is definitely not the case with ICFP. GREEN means you are within the national benchmarked range and RED means you are outside the benchmarked range.

There can be lots of very good reasons for being outside the benchmarked ranges and, when this is a conscious decision and the school can afford it, then that is fine. For instance, we often find that successful and high-performing secondary schools spend a greater percentage of their total revenue income on teachers than other similar schools. There are several reasons for this, particularly as teaching staff tend to be more stable and so stay as their salary increases. But this is often balanced out by lower curriculum support staff costs.

This means that the integrated curriculum and financial planning metrics can tell you how you match the benchmarked ranges, but can’t tell you what your metrics should look like. That depends on what you think is important and what you want your school to be like.

With ICFP.school you get an opportunity to discuss your metrics with an expert as well as being able to calculate them.