Learning without Limits Academy Trust was formed in 2016 to serve the communities of Leicester City and the surrounding areas. The Trust is made up of five schools and works with a small number of partner schools across both the primary and secondary phase. Its schools work closely with one another and benefit greatly from these relationships.
The Trust provides leadership and school improvement resource to improve its family of academies, working with them to remove non-educational distractions so they can focus on providing all learners with a bespoke package of support to be successful in achieving their aspirational targets and meet their potential.
The Challenge: Relaunching and embedding ICFP
In November 2022, Learning without Limits Academy Trust purchased IMP Planner to provide a MAT-first approach to budgeting, forecasting and reporting, supporting the Trust’s strategic approach to centralising finance which began in June 2021.
Recalling the implementation of IMP Planner, Chief Financial Officer Michelle Plumtree said: “We were previously using a school system that we were trying to maintain at MAT level – essentially it was upside down. Not only was it time-consuming and difficult to maintain, but we also struggled to get consistency across the Trust. If we wanted to update the pay scales we had to do it six times, logging into each school individually and amending. Even with five schools, it was very clunky and did not work for us. IMP is made for MATs, and schools are part of the Trust, whereas our previous system was made for schools with Trust consolidation a bolt on.”
With a planned relaunch of ICFP in spring/summer 2024 alongside the Trust’s budget-setting process using IMP Planner, Michelle set out to bring together headteachers and senior leaders on the journey. In order to turn ICFP into a “shared, strategic tool” across their schools, she needed a solution to “drive improved planning and collaboration”. With IMP Planner already working effectively, the release of IMP ICFP to support MAT-led integrated curriculum financial planning was a timely development.
The Solution: Deploying resources to meet the strategic needs of individual schools
In 2024, Learning without Limits Academy Trust had “a system of numerous spreadsheets individually maintained separately to the budget-setting software, and it was difficult to ensure staffing data was aligned and all information was consistently captured”. The decision was taken to move from IMP ICFP, where the budgeting and ICFP tools are fully integrated, and this was a key driver of the Trust’s relaunch.
At IMP Customer Connect 2025, Michelle outlined the key steps she has taken to ensure the successful relaunch of ICFP and how they it has helped to deliver real impact in the Trust:
- Having ICFP running throughout the Trust’s strategic priorities (finance and education), “reemphasising the fact that you need ensure an equitable experience for all pupils within your trust in all of your schools”.
- A clear timeline for delivery, agreed with the Trust’s Finance and Business Committee, with an update on progress being given at the next committee meeting on the position for each academy.
- Training and engagement meetings with senior leaders, which was “all about the whys and focus on how effective resource deployment can support with achieving the teaching and learning ambitions of schools”.
- Input to data, where the Trust focused on capturing “non-contact activities and specialisms to ensure that the reporting information was as informative as possible”.
- Meeting with headteachers to review the initial reporting who we found were “genuinely interested in those results,” and tracking ongoing impact.
Michelle explained how IMP ICFP has provided a technical solution to difficulties around ensuring consistency of approach, particularly where members of staff are involved:
“One of the problems we had previously with our spreadsheets was the inconsistencies in the information that was entered. Although everybody was using the same spreadsheet, we would often find that the data captured would vary. For example, if a person had a 50% timetable, 0.5 FTE was maybe added to the spreadsheet and the other 0.5 FTE of their time would not be included, and data was therefore incomplete. With IMP ICFP this does not happen as all identified roles are included. Your staffing is your staffing, if people are in a teaching post, a leadership post, or they are an unqualified teacher their data is included and their time is allocated accordingly to the activities that they are undertaking, whether it is cover supervisor time, teaching allocation or other non-contact activities. One of the real key benefits of IMP ICFP is the consistency in how you capture that data.”
Through non-contact time analysis, IMP ICFP has helped the Trust to fully understand the impact versus cost. “We have really engaged with colleagues to analyse their activities in their schools, and it is really important not to underestimate the importance of non-contact activities in that,” Michelle said. “Some of our schools have a focus of coaching and mentoring, so people have time off-timetable to deliver or receive this, and we have other allocations like small group interventions etc that are funded through various funding streams. We set up the non-contact elements to absolutely reflect the activities that were going on in the schools which allows headteachers to see the true cost of these initiatives.
“ICFP is not about saying, it’s expensive, you should not do it; it’s saying this is the cost, do you think you’re getting value for money from that? Is it delivering the intended impact? Even if we are not changing what we are doing, we are able to quantify the cost of those activities.”
Michelle also highlighted how insights enabled by IMP ICFP prompt discussions that “allows us to see the percentage of periods taught by non-specialists”.
“We have all got examples of where it has been necessary to slot a teacher into a subject area such as an English teacher who also teaches drama and actually, in the short term, that might be right and proper use of the capacity we have,” she commented. “However, when you are looking to recruit you may want to take that opportunity to switch those people back into their specialist areas. We have an approval to recruit process in place, which enables proactive planning. At that point we can refer to our specialisms and ensure that our staffing body is best placed to meet the curriculum being delivered. It informs discussions on short and long-term need, to look at individual schools’ curriculum plans and the areas they are growing. All these things are informing our recruitment process. That is definitely one of the real benefits of IMP ICFP.”
The Impact: Using IMP ICFP to drive better planning and collaboration
ICFP only delivers real impact when it is embraced beyond the finance team, and Michelle reflected on how the journey from building buy-in to using IMP ICFP to drive better collaboration and planning has made a difference.
“There have been some real key benefits since we have started to use ICFP on this level,” Michelle revealed. “But the thing that has heartened me the most is that when we started our budget-setting process for 2025-26, the conversations began so much further down the road than they had at the same point in the previous year. Headteachers pre-empted some of the things that I was going to ask them, and they had already considered these and had the answers for me. They had greater understanding themselves having been through it before and that will continue to improve the more that we develop this. So overall it has been a really positive relaunch, and the use of IMP ICFP has been very beneficial for our Trust.”
Michelle added: “It is not for me, as a CFO, to decide what a headteacher should be doing in their school. If there are things they want to do that they cannot afford to do, it is for me to give them the options. I am not the educationalist, I am not the specialist in curriculum development, and I need to empower them giving them the information to make informed decisions. This has enabled leaders to clearly recognise the advantages of the process. Keeping the focus on teaching and learning ambitions allows for collaborative decision-making.”
In considering the relationship with IMP Software, Michelle said: “What IMP have done is develop products and insights that respond to what MATs need, and that is important because the sector is full of products that are made for schools. With Planner, it is so easy to create a scenario and see exactly what your numbers are, and the quality of reporting has been transformed even further with API, which in turn supports my conversations with headteachers and trustees. With ICFP, we are now set up to meet the needs of the curriculum over the next three years, driving recruitment whilst also responding to challenges in funding and pupil rolls.
“IMP Planner and IMP ICFP have saved me hours upon hours, it is difficult to pinpoint how much time, everything timewise is much quicker. I always feel the support is there from IMP, both on a day-to-day basis and in their commitment to the product roadmap. Innovations like the IMP MAT Finance Benchmarking Reports are particularly useful, I would spend a lot of time trying to find comparable trusts for benchmarking but now we receive our own personalised benchmarking report. I would absolutely recommend IMP.”
