The five Ofsted Enrichment Benchmarks: what every secondary school needs to know

Earlier this year, the Government published its policy document in response to the Curriculum and Assessment Review led by Professor Becky Francis. Alongside the curriculum proposals that attracted most of the headlines, there was a section on enrichment that deserves significantly more attention than it has received in most schools.

The policy commits to providing an enrichment entitlement for every child. More practically, it sets out five Enrichment Benchmarks that every school will be expected to deliver — and, critically, to evidence. From later this year, these benchmarks will be incorporated into Ofsted’s updated inspection toolkit and will form part of the wellbeing and personal development review.

This is not a distant policy aspiration. It is an inspection framework change that is already in motion. Schools that are still thinking about enrichment as a nice-to-have are going to find themselves on the wrong side of a very clear expectation.

This article sets out what the five benchmarks are, what evidencing them actually requires in practice, and what most schools are currently missing.

What are the five Enrichment Benchmarks?

The Government’s response defines five categories of enrichment that schools should provide for every pupil. These are not optional extras — they are framed as a core enrichment offer that sits alongside the statutory curriculum.

Most secondary schools are already delivering activities that fall across all five of these categories. The benchmarks themselves are unlikely to require radical changes to what schools offer. The challenge is something different entirely.

The real challenge: evidencing, not delivering

When I talk to school leaders about enrichment, the most common assumption is that the work is already being done. In many cases, it is. Activities across all five benchmark categories exist in the vast majority of secondary schools.

What doesn’t exist, in most schools, is the data.

Those questions require data. Not anecdote, not a list of clubs on a website, not a teacher’s recollection. Attendance records, cross-referenced with pupil characteristics from your MIS, mapped against benchmark categories, and exportable in a format that tells a clear story.

For most schools, pulling that picture together currently requires a significant manual effort — cross-referencing attendance registers against MIS data to identify PP, FSM, EAL, and SEND pupils, then manually checking which benchmark categories their activities covered. That is not a sustainable process, and it is not what Ofsted will expect to see as a routine operation.

It’s one of the reasons Avalon Achieve® came about in the first place; senior leaders in one of our schools were (rightly) confident that they provided a wide variety of enrichment activities for their students. However, it took time to convince Ofsted they had the evidence to back it up – time that would be better spent preparing for other aspects of the inspection.

What ‘evidencing’ the benchmarks means

The Government is explicit that benchmarks will be included in school profiles and will form part of Ofsted’s personal development review. Based on the direction of travel in the inspection framework, here is what evidencing these benchmarks is likely to require:

• A central record of all enrichment activities, with each activity tagged to one or more of the five Enrichment Benchmark categories.
• Attendance data for every session, recorded at pupil level — not just overall participation numbers.
• Characteristic filters on that attendance data — the ability to show, at a click, how many PP pupils attended, how many SEND pupils, how many FSM pupils, and how that compares to the broader school population.
• Evidence of breadth across the five categories — not just depth in one or two areas.
• A mechanism to identify and follow up on pupils who are not engaging — the “one third of secondary school children who did not participate in any activities in the 2024/25 autumn term” is the Government’s own figure, and inspectors will ask what schools are doing about it.

None of this is technically complicated. But it does require the right infrastructure to be in place before the inspection call comes — not in the days following.

What data schools need right now

You do not need to wait for the updated Ofsted inspection toolkit to start building an evidence base. The five benchmark categories are already defined. Here is what schools can be doing today:

• Audit your current enrichment offer against the five categories — most schools will find they have reasonable breadth already, with gaps in one or two areas.
• Tag each activity to its primary benchmark category (some activities will span more than one).
• Ensure attendance is being recorded at pupil level for every session, not just as a headcount.
• Cross-reference your enrichment attendance against your MIS to identify which PP, FSM, EAL, and SEND pupils are engaging — and which are not.
• Identify the pupils who have attended no enrichment activities this term and flag them for pastoral follow-up.

If your current setup requires a manual cross-reference exercise to answer any of those questions, that is the gap worth closing before the inspection framework changes land.

A note on disadvantaged pupils

The compliance expectation in the white paper is not just that activities exist. It is that disadvantaged pupils — those on free school meals, eligible for pupil premium, with SEND,or with EAL — are actively accessing enrichment provision. The Government is clear that enrichment has for too long been the privilege of a lucky few.

This means that schools with high PP cohorts have a particularly clear obligation to demonstrate not just breadth of provision but equitable access. An attendance register that shows which activities ran is not sufficient. The question is who attended.

That cross-reference — enrichment attendance data linked to MIS pupil characteristics — is the piece most schools are currently missing. It requires either a manual process or a platform that handles the integration automatically.

What comes next

The enrichment benchmarks will be introduced when Ofsted updates its inspection toolkits, expected next academic year. Schools that build the data infrastructure now will be in a strong position. Schools that treat this as a future problem will be scrambling when the inspection call comes.

In the next article in this series, I’ll be looking specifically at how schools can build an Ofsted-ready evidence pack for the personal development judgement — what it needs to contain, how to structure it, and how to make it something that takes 20 minutes to produce rather than a weekend.