A benchmark is just another name for a hoop — until you stop jumping through it and start looking through it. How schools can respond to the DfE's Enrichment Framework without giving it a single evening they don't have.
When the DfE published its Enrichment Framework on 15 June [1], the response from staffrooms was not hard to predict. You could read it in the comments under Schools Week's coverage within hours [2]: who is paying for this, who is staffing this, and why is Ofsted anywhere near the clubs that teachers already run, unpaid, in their own time?
Fair questions. All of them.
Because here's the uncomfortable context the framework landed in. The Sutton Trust reported the highest-ever rates of school leaders cutting spending on trips, sport and extracurricular activities [3]. The new funding that accompanied the framework — £132.5 million for Every Child Can, £22.5 million for an expansion programme in up to 400 schools [4] — is targeted, not universal. Most schools will see the expectations and not the money. And this is, by Schools Week's count, at least the fifth new set of expectations handed to schools under this government [5].
So when a weary deputy head mutters that a benchmark is just another name for a hoop, they are not being cynical. They are pattern-matching. They have seen frameworks arrive before, and they know how the story usually goes: a document is published, an audit is commissioned, a folder is assembled, a wall display goes up, and eighteen months later nobody can remember why.
That is hoop-jumping. And the defining feature of hoop-jumping is that the work is performed for someone else's eyes. The audience is the inspector, the adviser, the trust board. The thinking is secondary to the evidencing. Nothing in school gets better; things merely get described.
Nobody is holding the hoop
Here is what the cynics have right, and it's worth saying plainly: nobody is holding this hoop. The framework is non-statutory [1]. There is no such thing as being "Enrichment Framework compliant" [6] — and the DfE has indicated that meeting the framework will not initially be essential for an expected-standard inspection outcome, recognising it is new [3]. Ofsted will consider enrichment within personal development from September, but as something it looks at, not a test you pass [4]. Even the NAHT's cautious welcome came with the condition that it works only "as long as it doesn't become another accountability tool" [3].
Here is what the cynics have wrong, and it matters more: the framework describes work you are already doing. The framework did not invent enrichment. It named eight features of an offer that's working: aligned with your priorities, broad, communicated, shaped by your community, accessible, partnered, outcomes-focused, improving [1].
Read those eight benchmarks as an inspection schedule and they are hoops. Read them as questions — is our offer reaching the children who need it most? do we actually know who turns up? — and they are simply the questions a thoughtful leadership team would ask anyway.
And a hoop nobody is holding has one redeeming feature: you can pick it up and look through it. Held to the eye rather than laid on the floor, the same eight benchmarks stop being obstacles and become a lens — a way of seeing your own enrichment offer clearly, framed one aspect at a time.
The difference between a hoop and a lens is which side of it you're on.
The real cost isn't the doing. It's the proving.
Talk to the schools that feel most burned by frameworks and you find the resentment is rarely about the provision. Teachers, by and large, love the clubs. The resentment is about the apparatus that grows around the provision: the audit spreadsheet, the self-evaluation document written in inspector prose, the action plan that duplicates the self-evaluation, the report to governors that duplicates both. Three documents, one truth, hours of a leader's life — and all of it out of date by half term.
The DfE, to its credit, has published a self-assessment tool and an action planning tool alongside the framework [1]. They are sensible. They are also Word documents — and every leader knows what happens to a Word-document self-evaluation. It is completed once, in a heroic evening, and then it is filed. It cannot show progress, because it is a snapshot. It cannot be shared without being emailed, versioned, and quietly forked. It answers the question "where were we in September?" forever.
This is where the time actually goes. Not into enrichment — into representations of enrichment.
Self-evaluation as thinking, not paperwork
There is an older, better idea of what self-evaluation is for, and it predates every framework: it is a structured way of thinking. How well are we doing? What's our evidence? What's helping, what's hindering? So what will we do? Four questions, answered honestly, by the people who know the school. That's it. Everything else — the reports, the assurance, the inspection conversation — should be a by-product of that thinking, not a separate industry alongside it.
This is the sequence iAbacus was built around, and the tool is what its name suggests: picture a simple abacus, one row of beads for each of the eight benchmarks. The further along the row a bead sits, the further your school has travelled — from just identifying an area, through developing and embedding it, to sustaining it [1]. That's the whole idea. No forms, no prose to draft: the leadership team looks at each benchmark and moves the bead to where an honest judgement puts it.
That first pass takes minutes, not evenings — and it is genuinely clarifying, because most schools discover their picture is uneven in a very particular way: the doing is miles ahead of the systems. A decade of forest school and fourteen clubs a week, sitting alongside participation tracking that lives in one TA's head. On the abacus, that shows up instantly — one bead nearly home, another barely started — and that single glance tells you more than a ten-page audit.
Then the framework's most useful question, the one the Word tools never quite force: what's helping and what's hindering? Put time itself on the list. Put the unpaid goodwill on the list — because it is simultaneously your greatest asset and, unmanaged, your greatest risk. A self-evaluation that names that honestly is worth more to a governing board (and, frankly, to an inspector) than any amount of polish.
And then the part that kills the duplication: your actions, evidence and judgements all live in one place, and the whole thing exports as one report. The self-evaluation is the action plan is the governor update. When you review it next term, you don't rewrite anything — you move the beads that have moved, and the record of progress draws itself. One living document instead of three dead ones.
Rather see it than read about it? Here's the whole process — judgement, criteria, evidence, factors, actions, and the later bead that shows your improvement — demonstrated end to end by iAbacus's creator, Daniel O'Brien:
Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.
An honest ending
No tool manufactures time, and we won't insult you by pretending otherwise. The staffing pressures the unions raised are real, and a framework does not fund a minibus.
But there is a choice in how schools spend the hours this framework will inevitably attract. Spend them jumping — performing for an imagined inspector — and the cynics will be proved right: another framework, another hoop, another folder. Spend them looking — briefly, honestly, together, in a way that leaves a visible trail — and the benchmarks become what they should have been all along: something to look through, not jump through.
The schools that come out of this well won't be the ones with the thickest evidence files. They'll be the ones who picked up the hoop, took a clear-eyed look at their own offer through it, and got back to running the clubs.
iAbacus is a self-evaluation and improvement-planning tool used by schools, trusts and colleges. An enrichment framework template, with the DfE's eight benchmarks and four-stage scale built in, is ready to use — the first honest pass takes less time than reading the guidance did.
References
- Department for Education, The enrichment framework for schools and colleges (including the eight benchmarks, self-assessment tool and action planning tool), GOV.UK, 15 June 2026. gov.uk/government/publications/the-enrichment-framework-for-schools-and-colleges
- Kenney, E., New enrichment benchmarks: What schools need to know, Schools Week, 15 June 2026. schoolsweek.co.uk/new-enrichment-benchmarks-what-schools-need-to-know
- DfE set to publish new enrichment benchmarks for schools, Schools Week, 14 June 2026 (includes Sutton Trust findings on extracurricular spending cuts and comment from Paul Whiteman, NAHT). schoolsweek.co.uk/dfe-set-to-publish-new-enrichment-benchmarks-for-schools
- Department for Education and Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Every child to get access to enriching activities to build skills and confidence for life (press release announcing the £132.5m Every Child Can programme and £22.5m Enrichment Expansion Programme), GOV.UK, 13 June 2026. gov.uk/government/news/every-child-to-get-access-to-enriching-activities
- 'Another expectation': Schools to be judged on enrichment benchmarks, Schools Week, 4 November 2025. schoolsweek.co.uk/another-expectation-schools-to-be-judged-on-enrichment-benchmarks
- Hyett, A., What the DfE Enrichment Framework Means for Your School, Hyett Education, June 2026. hyetteducation.com/resources/dfe-enrichment-framework-explained
- Department for Education, Background supporting the enrichment framework for schools and colleges (2024–25 participation data), GOV.UK, 15 June 2026. gov.uk/government/publications/the-enrichment-framework-for-schools-and-colleges/background
All links accessed 16 July 2026.
