Schools are under increasing pressure to evidence enrichment — not just run it. Before you commit to a platform, these are the questions worth asking.
I’ve sat in a lot of meetings with schools where someone has said, fairly confidently, that they have an enrichment platform. When you ask what it does (or even how it does it), it usually turns out to be a shared Google Sheet with a tab for each year group, or a Tes Resources form from 2019 that nobody has opened since the last inspection.
This isn’t a criticism. Schools are busy places and enrichment coordination tends to land on someone who already has three other jobs. But with Ofsted now placing serious weight on enrichment (and specifically on whether your disadvantaged students are actually participating), the spreadsheet approach is becoming a liability rather than just an inconvenience.
If you’re thinking about software to help, here are the five questions I would seek answers to before committing to anything.
1. Can it show you which pupils are not participating (and why that matters for Ofsted)?
Most enrichment platforms will show you a list of clubs, a list of students signed up, and maybe an attendance percentage. That’s the easy part!
What Ofsted wants to know goes deeper into the data: can you demonstrate that your pupil premium students, your SEND students or your FSM cohort are accessing enrichment at a comparable rate to everyone else? That’s a specific question about equity of access, and it requires a specific type of report.
Before you buy anything, ask the vendor to generate that report in front of you. Not a screenshot, not a mockup — live, from their system, showing participation broken down by pupil premium status. If they cannot do it cleanly, the platform will not help you with the bit Ofsted really cares about.
Ask the vendor to show you, live, a report showing enrichment participation by pupil premium status. If they cannot do it, move on.
2. Does it connect to your MIS?
This sounds like a technical question but it’s really a practical one. Your MIS knows which students are PP, SEND, FSM, EAL. If you have to sync that data via a CSV export or (worse) enter it manually into your enrichment platform, two things will happen: your data will drift, and someone will be spending time every term on admin they shouldn’t have to do.
The platforms that handle this well integrate directly with your MIS — through something like Wonde, which works with SIMS, Arbor, Bromcom and most of the others. The student data is always current. The reports are always accurate. Nobody needs to remember to run an import.
Ask specifically: is the MIS integration live and automated, or does it require manual intervention? The answer tells you a lot.
3. How much extra work does it create for your teachers?
This is the question most software vendors hope you do not ask, because the honest answer is often: quite a lot.
In most secondary schools, enrichment runs at the end of the day or during lunch. Staff who lead clubs are giving up their own time. If your software requires them to log in, take a digital register, add session notes and flag individual students, you will find one of two things happens: either they stop doing it, or your data is always three weeks out of date.
The best enrichment platforms are designed around the teacher’s reality. Taking a register should take under a minute. The compliance data should come out of that register automatically and not from a separate reporting task. Teachers shouldn’t need to think about Ofsted benchmarks or pupil premium flags when they are trying to run a badminton club for Year 9.
Ask the vendor to walk you through exactly what a teacher sees and does every session. Then ask what happens to your data if a teacher skips that step.
4. Does it actually use the five Ofsted Enrichment Benchmark Categories?
The five benchmark categories — Civic Engagement; Arts & Culture; Nature, Outdoors & Adventure; Sport & Physical Activities; and Developing Wider Life & Future Skills — sit at the heart of how Ofsted now thinks about enrichment. Schools need to show breadth of provision across all five.
Some platforms have retrofitted the benchmark categories (or not at all). Others were built to include them as a core part of how activities are categorised from the beginning. The difference matters in practice. If benchmark categories are an afterthought, you will end up filling in the blanks before an inspection, which defeats the point.
Ask the vendor to show you how your activities can be mapped against the five benchmark categories. If they struggle, you’re unable to demonstrate the breadth of coverage of your enrichment programme.
5. What does the first three months look like — really?
EdTech has a well-documented pattern of being bought, set up halfway, and then left to gather digital dust. The person who championed the purchase moves on. The initial training session was for SLT, not for the people who use it day-to-day. Nobody remembered to import the new year group data.
Before signing, I would want to know exactly what the implementation process involves, who does the configuration, and what support looks like six months in (not just the first week). I’d also want to speak to a school that has been using the platform for at least a year, not a reference site that signed up three months ago.
The best indicator of whether a platform is worth its cost is whether the schools already using it are still using it, and still happy to say so publicly.
What good looks like
These questions are not designed to be awkward. Most decent platforms will answer all five without breaking a sweat. They are just a useful filter for cutting through the demo polish and getting to what the software does in a real school on a normal day.
If you’d like to see how Avalon Achieve® handles them, you are welcome to take the two-minute readiness quiz or book a call. No hard sell — just a straightforward conversation.
