Integrated Curriculum Financial Planning (ICFP)
ICFP stands for Integrated Curriculum Financial Planning and is a tool developed to help educational institutions manage their finances comprehensively, responding to the Department for Education's growing demand for detailed information regarding costs at schools.
The tool can cover costs related to all outgoings in schools, such as individual salaries, class sizes and teacher availability, enabling them to pinpoint potential areas where funding may be inadequately allocated or missing.
The project was intended to connect to an existing tool widely used in schools called Education Budgets which is used by Access users, this meant they could plugin into their existing budget data.
More info: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/integrated-curriculum-and-financial-planning-icfp
Who I worked with
Product Owner
Development team
Quality Assurance
User Researchers
My Role
UX Research
UX Discovery
UI Design
Created for
The Access Group
Application
Education Budgets
Project Start Date
01/08/2024
Project Length
6 months
Design
The Challenge
We had noticed our users had been starting to discuss the need to adhere to integrated curriculum financial planning during the budgeting process. This requires them to plan out their budget with various elements in mind including things like building costs, teacher costs, contact time, classroom size etc.
The Department for Education have shared a spreadsheet which supports this activity, however, our customers had mentioned it was a very manual process and the document itself is difficult to understand.
The Goal
Having a space already dedicated for our users to build out their budgets for schools, we noticed there was a clear need for them to also be able to connect their budgets with an ICFP tool which would help them to build this out without too much manual effort.
Our goal was to support making this as easy as possible.
Project Specification
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Business
Scalable for future improvements
Compete with market space
User
Able to scale up or down capability for various user abilities
Quickly highlight areas for budget improvement
Functional
Connect with existing budgeting tool so data can be pulled through easily
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Limited time to design and develop
Hard to find users who had existing experience with this to understand needs
Limited knowledge currently out there for this type of tool
Many different user abilities, means that we had to keep it simple but advanced enough for more finance savvy users
Existing design system structure
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Finance Officers
Finance officers are starting to be expected to do Integrated Curriculum Financial Planning, they have an existing understanding of finance for education and need the system to be more complex to match their ability.
Business Managers
Business managers don’t always have a history with budgeting experience but need to start planning budgets more effectively and so need a simple system