ICFP vs Benchmarking

Integrated Curriculum and Financial Planning can sometimes be dismissed as just a rather fancy name for benchmarking, but they are two very different processes. The purpose of ICFP is to assist schools to make adjustments to their deployment of resources so they can maximise the impact for pupils. Below we consider some of the reasons why ICFP is a more useful process than simply benchmarking.

ICFP looks ahead whilst benchmarking looks backward. Benchmarking requires historical data and so is always out of date, and until the very end of the year it is often more than 12 months out of date so it can only show where you have come from and, due to changes, is often very out of date. ICFP, however, is forward looking and projects national data forward so schools can look at where the school may be in one, two or up to three years ahead. (Beyond three years budgets tend to tip from informed assumptions into guesswork and so are much less reliable.)

ICFP allows schools to identify solutions as well as issues. A benchmarking approach will tell a school where they are spending above the benchmarked ranges, but doesn’t help the school to identify what to do about it. For instance, you may look at the benchmarks and see that energy costs are benchmarked as high, but there is little that can be done to address this in the short-term. ICFP, however, uses a variety of metrics that work together to identify solutions. For instance, if the ICFP indicates that the teaching spend is high further metrics like the average teacher cost, pupil teacher ratio and teacher contact ratio will help identify what can be done to make the school more efficient.

ICFP allows the school to cost a range of approaches. As ICFP is looking at where the school is going rather than where it has come from it is possible to make adjustments to the deployment of resources, and test out the impact of those adjustments, in advance of setting a final budget rather than waiting to see the impact of changes once they have happened.

ICFP focuses on the curriculum rather than just the financial position. Curriculum is within the name because it is the focus of the ICFP approach. The metrics are based around the provision of the most efficient curriculum model looking at aspects such as the efficiency of class sizes and the breadth of the curriculum and the way that staff are deployed to it rather than simply looking at costs. It means that a genuine conversation can happen around high teacher staff costs and whether these can be reduced.

ICFP provides genuinely useful management information. Benchmarking provides information about how the school has spent money whilst ICFP raises questions about future deployment of resources and opens up the discussion about whether the school’s current proposals are likely to have the greatest impact for pupils.

So ICFP is not a new name for benchmarking but rather a crucial strategic decision making tool for leaders and governors/trustees.