Why have we developed ICFP Software?

Integrated Curriculum and Financial Planning (ICFP) has been a central element of our work for many years; both the work we and our consultants do as School Resource Management Advisers (SRMAs), but also when we work with schools on their efficiency. This means we have worked with a wide range of ICFP tools. Most of those tools have been spreadsheet based.

Excel is, of course, a fantastic tool. I am constantly surprised at what Excel can do. But it can also be quite cumbersome, especially when it comes to collaboration. The biggest issues we found with spreadsheet tools were:

• Version Control. The whole purpose of ICFP is to make changes to the base data to address any issues which are identified. This means the data is constantly changing and tracking which is the latest, or the favourite, model is problematic. This is particularly difficult when you are collaborating with other either as a consultant or within an organisation.

• Updates. One of the purposes of ICFP is to respond to the latest data. However, the benchmark or threshold data is hard coded into the various spreadsheet tools we have used. When new thresholds are available then we have to start again from the beginning of the process and re-enter the data into a new spreadsheet.

• Editing. Several of the spreadsheet solutions expect the data to be entered over several tabs to then appear in the final ICFP table. However, this means finding where you need to amend data can be difficult, particularly if you need to amend multiple field (for instance a reduction of 1 SLT would mean changing the teacher FTE, SLT cost and total teaching cost.)

We believe that ICFP.school addresses all these issues. And more. In fact, we are constantly taking feedback from customers who identify new opportunities to streamline the process and, as a small and agile software company, we are able to make those changes quickly.

Please get in touch if you’d like a demo.