This blog is part of our 2025 budgeting season help series, where we’re helping MAT CFOs navigate the budgeting season and ensure Smarter MAT Finance. Download our interactive budgeting checklist here.
Effective budgeting is the cornerstone of a well-run MAT, ensuring resources are allocated to maximise student outcomes while maintaining financial stability. However, too often, budgeting decisions are made in isolation from curriculum planning, leading to friction between teams as budgets are prepared and ultimately arriving at plans that are not optimised to meet the priorities of the schools in the trust. By prioritising curriculum planning before the budget-setting process, schools can align their educational goals with their financial realities, creating a more balanced and effective approach.
Integrated Curriculum and Financial Planning (ICFP) is a planning approach that trusts and schools use to create strategic plans. However, trusts have struggled to embed this approach into their planning cycles, primarily due to the limitations of existing tools.
Budgeting is not merely about numbers; it is about enabling a vision. Schools exist to educate and empower students, and their budgets should reflect this purpose. Early curriculum planning provides clarity and purpose to financial decisions, ensuring every pound is spent with intention. This blog explores why early curriculum planning is essential and how trusts can make this shift effectively.
How Budgets Have Been Approached in the Past
Traditionally, school budgeting has followed a top-down approach, focusing on financial constraints and operational costs first, with curriculum planning often being an afterthought. This reactive method forces schools to fit their educational priorities into pre-determined financial limits rather than building budgets around the needs of pupils/students and staff.
Budgets are often developed by examining historical spending patterns or responding to funding limitations. This approach leaves little room for innovation or adaptation to evolving curriculum and pupil/student needs. Decisions on staffing, resources, and classroom structures are often made without considering the full implications for the curriculum offer. As a result, schools face challenges such as:
- Oversized or undersized classes that impact teaching quality.
- Misaligned staffing that leads to inefficiencies in resource use.
- Reduced support for essential programmes or extracurricular activities.
These inefficiencies highlight the need for a paradigm shift in how schools approach budgeting – one that puts the curriculum at the forefront.
The Risk of Curriculum Plans as an Afterthought
When curriculum plans are secondary to financial considerations, the outcomes often fall short of expectations. Schools risk:
- Failing to provide a balanced curriculum that meets the diverse needs of pupils/students.
- Creating disconnects between staff deployment and actual teaching requirements.
- Missing opportunities to innovate and improve pupil/student outcomes.
- Not identifying challenges that demand structural changes late in the process and having to react quickly to address emerging issues.
This backward approach to budgeting places unnecessary pressure on schools to ‘make do’ with what they have rather than planning strategically to achieve their goals.
Why Getting Curriculum Plans in Place Before Crunching Numbers Is Important
Curriculum plans form the foundation of a school’s operations, outlining the subjects, class structures, and staffing requirements necessary to achieve educational goals. Establishing these plans early allows schools to:
- Identify the resources required to deliver a comprehensive and effective curriculum. Understanding the teaching hours, facilities, and materials needed ensures that budgets are grounded in reality.
- Ensure staffing levels and expertise align with teaching requirements. Early planning allows for better recruitment and deployment strategies, reducing the risk of shortages or overstaffing.
- Highlight potential gaps or inefficiencies before financial decisions are locked in.
By analysing curriculum needs first, schools can prioritise spending and avoid wasteful allocations.
By making curriculum planning the first step in the budget cycle, schools can prioritise pupil/student outcomes and build financial plans that support, rather than restrict, their educational vision. This proactive approach fosters better alignment between teaching priorities and available resources.
When You Arrive at Budget Setting
Even with robust curriculum plans in place, the budget-setting process often requires iteration to balance the curriculum offer, staffing deployment, and financial constraints. This is where schools must:
- Revisit and adjust curriculum plans to ensure they are financially sustainable. Flexibility is key to adapting plans without compromising quality.
- Optimise staffing deployment to match curriculum needs within budget limits. This might involve restructuring roles or considering alternative delivery methods for some subjects.
- Balance trade-offs to maintain a high-quality educational experience while staying within financial boundaries. Schools must weigh the benefits and costs of different options, ensuring that critical areas receive adequate resourcing.
This iterative process highlights the importance of having flexible tools and frameworks that allow for seamless adjustments while keeping the curriculum at the centre of decision-making.
The Ripple Effect of Early Planning
Early curriculum planning doesn’t just impact budgeting; it influences every aspect of a school’s operations. It enables better decision-making at all levels, from classroom management to extracurricular offerings. Moreover, it sets a clear direction for staff, pupils/students, and parents, fostering a sense of purpose and shared goals.
Schools that prioritise curriculum planning are better positioned to:
- Adapt to changes in funding or policy without compromising their core objectives.
- Build strong relationships with stakeholders by demonstrating transparency and foresight.
- Create a culture of continuous improvement, where resources are used strategically to enhance learning outcomes.
Why Using Integrated Tools Can Help with This
Integrated tools that join budgeting information, curriculum plans, and staffing deployment can streamline this process. These tools:
- Provide real-time insights into the financial implications of curriculum decisions. By linking curriculum plans with budget data, schools can ensure a cohesive and aligned approach to planning and foster collaboration between curriculum and finance teams.
- Allow for scenario planning, helping schools visualise the impact of changes before implementation. What happens if pupil/student numbers are expected to fall? How will a new subject offering affect staffing? Integrated tools answer these questions with precision.
- Save time by eliminating the need to reconcile data between separate systems manually. Automating processes reduces errors and frees up staff to focus on strategic planning.
With integrated tools, schools can achieve a harmonious balance between curriculum delivery and financial sustainability, ensuring resources are used effectively to support pupil/student success. These tools also empower leadership teams to communicate their strategies clearly to stakeholders, building trust and accountability.
Practical Examples
Consider a school that uses ICFP methodology to align its curriculum with its budget. By starting with a detailed curriculum plan, the school can identify areas where resources are underutilised, such as staff assigned to courses with low enrollment. By reallocating those resources, a school can introduce new courses and reduce class sizes in key areas while staying within budget.
Another example is a school that faces a sudden funding shortfall due to a reducing pupil roll. Because it has clear plans to manage this, the leadership team can quickly adjust its curriculum and staffing without materially impacting the pupil offer. This level of agility would not be possible without early planning and the right tools.
Ready to Put ICFP at the Heart of Your Planning Process?
Would you like to see how IMP’s budgeting (IMP Planner) and ‘truly’ integrated ICFP tools (IMP ICFP) can help you put curriculum planning at the heart of your budget-setting process, streamline decision-making, and ensure every pound supports your educational goals? Speak with our experts to learn more.
