Going against the flow

It is better to walk against the flow of the crowd than to walk with the crowd in another direction.

Curriculum Enhancement

Why does Curriculum Enhancement (CE) matter? Contact Ratios and Pupil Teacher Ratios are familiar to most school leaders as measures of classroom resourcing. At the most simplistic level, given that they have been around for a long time and the problems of funding that are now facing schools, one could ask whether the majority of […]

SMARTcurriculum Update Issue 6

After a year of development, we are now entering our second year of licences and those who have been using the app will see some major feature developments that will be released in September 2019. Three features will be the curriculum model feedback, the staff expenditure chart and the staffing analysis. The Curriculum Model Following […]

Academy Ambassadors – Fundamentals of Education

SMARTcurriculum featured in the Academy Ambassadors Fundamentals of Education resources.

​Pack them in?

When we talk about class size it becomes a really contentious issue. Ministers are criticised for an agenda of raising them; Education Endowment Fund (EEF) curate research evidence that suggests that reducing class size is costly and has little impact on outcomes for learners (1); and teachers will say that in certain contexts ‘big’ classes are unmanageable […]

Boom or Bust

I was talking to my son-in-law the other day about what we do within schools and the SMARTcurriculum work. He, like many outside the education dome, expressed a complete lack of understanding or appreciation of the working of schools. ‘It’s just there – teachers teach classes, don’t they?’ was his response. He had not considered the HR, finance and funding efficiency […]

The eternal round

Once you have considered the Curriculum Enhancement value, we then need to consider how much curriculum is too much; how we can control it; and what influences the amount that we plan in? In the example used in the recent blog ‘Return on Investment’, we showed that the basic curriculum design is based on the principles described of optimised class sizes and efficient delivery. Curriculum Enhancement is the […]

Return on investment

Our recent blog post ‘Magnificent Seven’ outlined the seven measures used within the Integrated Curriculum Finance Planning (ICFP) indicators of school efficiency. I just want to take a moment to consider a measure that many are grappling with and some feel has little, or even negative impact, on a school. I will say at the beginning that I believe it can be […]

Hatchet or Scalpel?

You may not have seen our recent post in the Confederation of School Trusts . The goal is to develop a different narrative in the world of funding challenges toward an investment frame rather than a deficit frame. ‘We do not have enough to carry on doing what we have always done, but rather we […]

The Eleventh Hour

We have observed, while analysing curriculum design over many years, that school leaders tend to invest time and resources at particular thresholds in a learner’s journey throughout their education. Over recent years much has been said about intervention strategies, which in layman’s terms means that we throw time and resources near to examination thresholds to […]

The Magnificent Seven

In an attempt to define Integrated Curriculum Finance Planning (ICFP), the Department for Education (DFE) originally outlined 7 measures that would make a significant difference in managing an establishment budget. Today this has been extended to 10 planning checks (Link here). You may be familiar with other systems that use a combination of these metrics outlined […]

Dream the Impossible Dream

ICFP, Integrated Curriculum Finance Planning, coined by Kate Copley a Deputy Director within the Department for Education (DFE), is the term that the DFE is now using to describe a process that has had a number of names in recent years. Some will recognise ‘Curriculum Led Finance Planning’ (CLFP) used by Outward Grange Academy Trust (OGAT) and various NPQH/NPQEL providers to describe a […]