HEART Academies Trust is a four-school MAT in Bedford. The trust was established in 2017 to support local schools build upon existing strengths to improve and maintain high educational standards and encourage continuity of education within the local community. Its core aim is to create a family of academies who are at the heart of their community delivering great education for pupils aged 4-18, improving life chances for all.
With three primaries and one secondary school, HEART (High Expectations Achievement Respect Trust) adopts a ‘stronger together’ approach and a commitment to positive collaboration enables each academy within the trust. As part of its chosen finance model, the trust has long adopted Integrated Curriculum and Financial Planning (ICFP), a management process that helps schools plan the best curriculum for their pupils with the funding they have available. It can be used at any phase or type of school.
ICFP involves measuring current curriculum, staffing structure and finances, and using the data to create a three to five-year plan. However, HEART’s Chief Finance Officer Paul Edmond said implementing this had been challenging.
“We have used ICFP for a long time. We previously relied on Excel spreadsheets followed by a third-party software, which allowed us to collaborate across our schools, but we were experiencing double or multiple manual entries all the time so this was ineffective,” he explained. “As soon as we heard about the development of IMP ICFP we wanted to be involved. We were part of the MAT development testing group and it was beneficial to collaborate with other trusts in its design. We can see already that IMP ICFP budgeting is far more reliable and useful – as well as reducing time it has, in effect, removed error and duplication from our work on ICFP.”
IMP ICFP aligns data-driven conversations between financial and curriculum leadership, enabling an integrated staffing model and multi-year ICFP planning, all within a MAT-first design. “We are now using IMP ICFP as we plan for 2024-25 budget setting,” Paul said. “It is being embedded in our budgeting process: so not only we are learning to use it with the support of IMP’s excellent team, we are engaging heads and applying it for its intended purpose. Already it is giving more reliable data, not more data, and it is reliable because we have this in the same place rather than multiple places relying on Excel spreadsheets.”
Paul revealed that one specific benefit of IMP ICFP is the trust can easily view specialisms and whether or not subjects are being delivered by a specialist teacher.
“From a school perspective it is a more engaging conversation to support them in how they put a curriculum together to deliver the best for the children,” he said. “The data informs the quality of conversation, with children, young people and teachers at the centre of it.
“The insight we are getting from IMP ICFP has therefore become an important stimulation for conversation on teaching structure, why schools are set up the way they are and what they might do differently, rather than all about efficiency metrics. It is becoming useful for really rich conversations on teaching structure to support the curriculum we want to deliver and then it is for our trust School Improvement Director and Heads to come together to reflect on that structure. It is very much a collaborative discussion.
“In our trust, there is no ‘finance tells us what to spend’ mentality. It is not, and has never been, for finance to inform areas of curriculum improvement.”
With IMP ICFP set up for both primary and secondary schools, Paul highlighted that success over the next 12 months would be for ICFP to be “fully embedded across the trust and our schools, linked to forecasting and ideally enable improved three-to-five year budget setting.”
Paul concluded: “Anyone on their ICFP journey should talk to other trusts about their approach. With IMP ICFP my advice is simply to get stuck in and dedicate some time to exploring its potential. There is a lot in there, but the more you put in, obviously the more you will get out. The IMP support team is fantastic, really responsive and really helpful. Be open to asking them lots of questions too.”
Case study developed: February 2024
