The Wensum Trust has 11 schools situated across Norfolk, ranging from nursery through to sixth form, enabling the Trust to support children and their parents and carers at every stage of the education journey. Since it was founded in 2016, the Trust has demonstrated a successful track record in bringing about rapid and sustained improvements for its schools, which are arranged into three geographical hubs: a City Hub, Coastal Hub and Rural Hub.
The Challenge: Financial difficulties and the need for forward-looking ICFP insight
When CFO Alice Boesen joined the Wensum Trust in July 2023, she was able to immediately benefit from IMP Planner, which had been procured and implemented by her predecessor in the role.
Not long after, however, the Trust was visited by one of the Department for Education’s School Resource Management Advisors (SRMAs) due to financial concerns and was advised that they needed to make more use of 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. This can be used at any phase or type of school.
“When I arrived at the Trust, I received four or five hours of training from IMP, and one of my first tasks was to review and finalise our budget,” Alice recalled. “Whilst I was heavily involved in academy audits in my previous role, I had not used budgeting software previously, and the support from IMP was invaluable. When discussing ICFP data with the SRMA, we were steered towards software which delivered metrics based on historical data. However, it became clear that IMP ICFP offered us forward-looking data based on live staffing lists, providing a very helpful tool for planning and budget setting.”
The Solution: Systemised Trust-led, Integrated Curriculum Financial Planning
IMP ICFP helps multi-academy trusts maximise educational success by ensuring the effective deployment of resources across their schools. It has provided support to the Trust in designing the best curriculum they can afford.
“We have spent time carefully setting up ICFP: putting all our staffing in, getting IMP ICFP live, and undertaking multiple training sessions,” Alice said. “Through IMP ICFP we can look at all staff (not just teaching staff), levels of income per school and trust-wide, and we can now understand staff ratios and metrics versus pupil numbers. IMP tools are all about looking forward, which has been incredibly helpful for us.”
Alice revealed that IMP ICFP has enabled conversations with school leaders. “I have been able to share the ICFP tables with our headteachers, showing them each member of their staff (a mix of teachers and non-teachers) and confirming the allocations with them,” she commented. “This way we are capturing not just the curriculum and teaching hours, but everyone across every school. We want to look individually by school, and to compare easily across schools, which we can do through IMP ICFP.
“ICFP gives valuable insight for each school on how they operate, how we structure classes and provide education, and ensure there is parity, fairness and consistency across all our schools. It shines a spotlight on where this may not be the case, and ensures there are no inconsistencies that can’t be explained. It provides metrics to support those difficult decisions, and ensures the decisions taken are robust. Now our ICFP is set up, we are looking at the various reports that can be generated, and the conclusions to be taken from those reports.”
Alice specifically outlined how IMP ICFP has supported, with examples, understanding of deployment of leadership or education support in primary:
“As part of a staffing review in 2024, we set clear assumptions around leadership and educational support staff in our primaries, including around leadership teaching time. We also no longer deploy education support staff (e.g. TAs) to specific classes, instead they work where the need arises, so ICFP allows us to see if any do still work on a class specific basis (i.e. by allocating some of their time to a specific class for PPA cover for example), and the remaining hours which are available mainly to support SEN need. Likewise, for leadership, it has been helpful to understand which leaders have class or teaching responsibilities, and to align this to ensure consistency between our schools.”
She also highlighted what the Trust had learned from analysing the non-contact activities across primaries. “It has been helpful to understand the roles we have in our primaries, whether these are consistent between schools, and we expect to review this against pupil numbers to identify any areas where we might be over/under expectations,” Alice said. “Specifically, the ‘cost per pupil’ of the non-contact roles in the School ICFP dashboard provides a key metric for these non-contact areas.
“We will be using the allocations to get a better understanding of our support staff in our schools. Many jobs are long standing, historic or have evolved over time, and therefore unpicking the schools ‘need’ (i.e. based on some key assumptions around pupil numbers and the school’s context) versus what a school may be used to, will be helpful to reduce costs going forwards in the context of an ever-concerning financial backdrop.”
The Impact: Rolling out ICFP, and enabling decisions alongside the value of IMP Planner
The Wensum Trust is using IMP ICFP (and IMP Planner) to provide multi-year plans and is benefiting from the MAT-first design and functionality.
Alice said: “At the time of writing, we are in budget-setting mode, and looking at ICFP roll-out to 2025-26 and onwards. Pupil numbers are dropping, the demographic is decreasing, and so we are feeding this through together with GAG statements into the system and we can see how that is impacting on class sizes and resourcing given the reduction in numbers. For this, IMP ICFP is proving invaluable, and having it in place enables decisions to be taken.
“At the same time we are defining our plan to build up our reserves again. IMP Planner has provided all-round support for budget setting, then forecasting, and the expected outturn for the whole year. This is always a moving target, but IMP allows for forecasting using key assumptions. It is user-friendly, captures data by school and at trust-level, and this feeds into our management accounts. We have every member of staff on our payroll in IMP and as long as the data is accurate we can see in Planner the financial impact of our staff base now and into the future.”
Alice also praised the wider role of IMP Software, and the level of support received. “It has definitely been valuable to be involved in the IMP Benchmarking Reports, for example, which allow us to compare how we are looking to other trusts,” she explained. “As a member of the finance team, it is easy to be so busy on the day-to-day, that looking outwards at others in the sector can easily be overlooked.
“On a day-to-day basis, the team are very good at communication. IMP has a really strong chat function, not a robot but a name you can recognise, and if the person at the other end doesn’t know the answer, they will go away and find out. We also receive a transcript of the chat, which is incredibly helpful. Set-up, implementation and training all have different teams, but the point of contact is clear throughout the process and each member of IMP staff has treated us with kindness and respect (even when we ask silly questions!).”
She concluded: “As software goes, I feel lucky that IMP Planner was already in place when I joined the Trust and I am very happy with the support we receive. Adding ICFP to our IMP Planner has further enhanced the functionality for which we are very grateful.”
