Last Friday, I was in a room with secondary headteachers from across Kingston and Richmond in south-west London. The session was organised around the Curriculum and Assessment Review — a topic that is consuming a lot of thinking time in schools right now. But the conversation that stayed with me wasn’t about curriculum structure or assessment design. It was about enrichment. More specifically, about the gap between what schools are doing and what they can actually prove.
I want to share three things I took from that room. Not as a salesperson, but as someone who has spent a long time thinking about how schools manage, track, and evidence what happens outside the classroom.
1. Every school in that room understood what the Enrichment Benchmarks were. Few felt ready for them
The Government’s response to the Curriculum and Assessment Review was clear: enrichment is no longer a nice-to-have. The five benchmark categories — civic engagement, arts and culture, nature and outdoor adventure, sport and physical activity, and developing wider life skills — will form part of Ofsted’s new inspection toolkit when its updated later this year.
The headteachers I spoke to weren’t surprised by this. Most had read the white paper. Many had already begun internal conversations about how to respond. But when asked to consider a simple question — could you, right now, show me which activities you run in each benchmark category, and which pupils attended them last term? — few could answer confidently.
Awareness isn’t the same as readiness. In a trust-led sector where notification can be received on a Monday for an inspection starting Tuesday, that gap matters.
2. The anxiety isn’t about activities. It’s about evidence
This was the thing that struck me most. These are not schools that aren’t doing enrichment. The headteachers I spoke to run drama clubs, Duke of Edinburgh programmes, various sports practices and fixtures, debating societies, and chess clubs. The activities are there. The problem is that the data isn’t.
Two anxieties came up repeatedly:
First: disadvantaged pupils. The white paper is explicit — schools need to confirm that PP, FSM, SEND and EAL pupils are accessing enrichment, not just that enrichment exists. For most schools, getting that answer requires someone to manually cross-reference attendance records with MIS data. That’s a half-day job nobody has time for, and it’s not a job you want to be doing the week Ofsted arrives.
Second: audit trails. One leader put it simply: “I know exactly what enrichment activities run in school, I just can’t put my hand on the data immediately to prove it”. That’s the compliance gap in plain terms. It’s not a quality problem. It’s a data problem.
3. The question that nobody asked out loud — but everyone was thinking
There’s an underlying question I don’t think gets asked directly enough in conversations about enrichment compliance. It isn’t “do we offer enough activities?” Most schools do. It isn’t even “are disadvantaged pupils attending?” Most schools have some sense of this, even if it’s imprecise.
The question is: “If Ofsted asked us tomorrow which disadvantaged pupils attended enrichment activities this term, how quickly could we answer — and would the answer hold up?”
I didn’t ask this out loud during the session. But I’ve asked it enough times in one-to-one conversations with school leaders to know that the honest answer, in most schools, is “not quickly enough, and probably not confidently enough.”
That’s not a criticism. It’s the reality of managing enrichment with manual systems, fragmented registers, and data that lives in too many different places.
One practical thing any school can do this week
You don’t need software to start closing this gap. What you need is a single, central list of every enrichment activity your school runs — and next to each one, the Enrichment Benchmark category it maps to.
Once you have that list, two things become possible. First, you can quickly see where your provision is thin — which benchmark categories are underrepresented. Second, when you’re tracking attendance, you’re tracking it against a framework that Ofsted will recognise.
It sounds simple because it is. The complexity comes when you need to cross-reference that attendance data with MIS characteristics — when you need to know not just who attended the drama club, but whether the PP pupils attended, and how often. That’s where the seeming simplicity of a central list and a spreadsheet start to fall short.
But the list is the starting point. Build it this week if you haven’t already.
