Every Child Can: Enrichment Meets the Data Spine

The 60-second Briefing

• On June 13, the DfE announced the £132.5m Every Child Can programme, funded through the Dormant Assets Scheme and delivered through schools, community organisations, weekend activities and holiday provision.
• On June 15, the DfE published a new Enrichment Framework with eight benchmarks and five categories (civic engagement; arts and culture; nature, outdoors and adventure; sport and physical activity; wider life and future skills including STEM).
• The framework is non-statutory. Ofsted will consider enrichment under Personal Development from September 2026, but will not inspect against the benchmarks as a compliance test.
• Independent schools have run enrichment programmes for decades. The framework is not a request to start; it is an invitation to be more systematic about what is already happening.
• The interesting question, for anyone with a technology or data remit, is where enrichment sits in the school's data spine. In most schools, the honest answer is nowhere.

It was Enrichment Week at many independent schools last week, and it was, as always, one of the highlights of the school year. Timetables suspended, pupils chose sessions ranging from creative writing workshops to Duke of Edinburgh expeditions to community volunteering placements, and staff spent a week doing something recognisably different from their normal work. It is, in the honest opinion of anyone who has taught in a school, one of the most valuable weeks in the calendar. It also happened a fortnight after the government announced its biggest push on enrichment in a generation.

On June 13, the Department for Education announced Every Child Can, a £132.5m programme funded through the Dormant Assets Scheme. It aims to make enrichment "a common entitlement for all, not just those who can afford to pay." Two days later, the DfE published its new Enrichment Framework, eight benchmarks organised around five categories: civic engagement; arts and culture; nature, outdoors and adventure; sport and physical activity; and what the DfE calls "wider life and future skills," which covers STEM, digital literacy, cooking, financial literacy and enterprise. The framework is non-statutory. Ofsted will take enrichment into account under Personal Development from September 2026, but it has been clear that this is not a compliance exercise. As Tes reported, meeting the framework will not be a requirement for schools to achieve an "expected standard" or above.

There is an interesting angle to this. There may be a temptation, in the independent sector, to read Every Child Can as the state sector belatedly reaching for what independent schools have been doing for a hundred years. That is not entirely wrong, but it is not a useful place to start. Enrichment Week, the Duke of Edinburgh, the ski trip, the CCF, the debating society, the string quartet, the Silver Book scheme, the Model UN trip: independent schools have always done enrichment, and they have done it well. The question is not whether independent schools are ahead. It is whether being ahead has stopped independent schools from being systematic.

Ask an independent-school leader to name the five most impactful enrichment activities the school ran last academic year, and they will do it fluently. Ask them to demonstrate, with data, which pupils participated in each, how progression across categories differed by year group and demographic, and what the outcomes were for those pupils compared to non-participants, and the answer is usually a rueful smile. It is not that the data does not exist. It is that it lives in a spreadsheet on someone's laptop, an activity log in the CCF office, a set of sign-up sheets in Games, and perhaps a shared drive belonging to the Music department that nobody has audited for three years. The activities are excellent. The record-keeping is a heritage system.

The Enrichment Framework's eight benchmarks include, and I think this is the most important of them, an expectation of "effective monitoring and evaluation." Also on the list are "universal access" and "meaningful pupil voice." Independent schools tend to think of enrichment as something the school offers. The framework asks schools to think of enrichment as something the school evidences, and evidences equally across pupils. That is a different discipline.

There is a connection worth drawing to a couple of earlier pieces on this blog. In The Connected Court, I wrote about how sports tech like VEO cameras and motion analysis is generating pupil-level participation and progression data that used to be impossible to capture. That is one of the five enrichment categories doing its own homework. The same principle applies across the other four. A music department that tracks who is in an ensemble, for how long, and what progression they made is generating category two data. A DofE coordinator whose expedition records are pupil-linked in the MIS is generating category three data. A debating society with an attendance register that talks to the pastoral system is generating category one data. Most independent schools have almost all of this happening. Almost none of them have it in one place.

Which brings us to Survival of the Leanest. The argument in that post was that the schools most likely to survive the VAT era are the ones with a coherent digital spine, integrating pupil data across attainment, attendance, pastoral, and safeguarding. Enrichment has been the missing category in that picture. It has been treated as something that happens alongside the data spine rather than something the data spine should carry. The Enrichment Framework changes that quietly. If Ofsted is looking at enrichment as part of Personal Development, and the ISI's framework asks similar questions of independent schools, then the ability to answer those questions with evidence rather than anecdote becomes an inspection-week concern. That elevates enrichment from a Deputy Head's spreadsheet to an MIS category in its own right.

There is a further piece worth flagging, which is the equity question. The Sutton Trust's Artificial Advantage? documented the AI training gap between sectors, and I covered it in The Artificial Advantage. Enrichment is one of the older, better-documented sector gaps. The reason Every Child Can exists at all is that participation in the kinds of activities independent schools take for granted is very unevenly distributed by postcode and household income. The government's argument is that enrichment "should become a broader entitlement for children," and that is a statement independent schools should not roll their eyes at. The ethical response is not to say "we already do this." It is to ask what independent schools, with their extensive experience of running enrichment programmes, can contribute to the wider ambition. The £22.5m Enrichment Expansion Programme inviting 400 schools in deprived areas to build their own offer is one of many places where partnership between sectors could be genuinely useful.

For those with a procurement or IT remit, three practical questions are worth putting on the agenda before September, when Ofsted's revised framework starts looking at enrichment provision.

The first is how enrichment activity is currently recorded in the MIS. If the answer is "it isn't, mostly," then a mapping exercise across departments is the first piece of work. What data is captured, by whom, in what system, and how does it get from there to a report card, a UCAS reference, or an inspection dashboard?

The second is what the school's enrichment offer actually looks like against the five categories. Independent schools tend to be strong on arts and culture and on sport, and often on nature and adventure. Civic engagement and wider life and future skills are often present but less systematically tracked. The framework provides a common language for auditing this. A short internal review this summer, category by category, would tell a school where it is strongest and where the gaps are.

The third is where the £132.5m of Every Child Can funding actually goes. The Department for Education has been notably reluctant to confirm whether it will pass through schools directly or via external supporting organisations. Independent schools are unlikely to be direct beneficiaries, but the community organisations they partner with may be. If a school already runs joint enrichment activities with state-sector schools, local councils, or community groups, it is worth knowing where the money is going over the next year and whether there are opportunities to expand shared provision.

Enrichment Week will have been, for many pupils, one of the most memorable parts of their school year. The Duke of Edinburgh party has come back muddy from Snowdonia. The forensic-science group fingerprinted each other in a mock crime scene. The music tour produced videos parents are already watching on repeat. The pastoral team has a set of stories to tell at the next staff briefing. Enrichment is what schools are for, once the core subjects are being taught properly. It is where pupils discover the parts of themselves that GCSE grades do not measure.

The framework is not a threat to any of that. It is an invitation to make it visible. Independent schools have spent generations proving to prospective parents that enrichment matters. The Enrichment Framework provides a common language for proving it to inspectors, to peers, to state-sector partners, and increasingly to the pupils themselves. Both readings hold: enrichment is a genuine and long-standing strength of the independent sector, and being strong is not an argument for staying informal.

Enrichment Week is over for another year. The DofE parties are home, the coach has pulled back into the drive, and the pastoral team has its stories. The question that starts now is a quieter one: what has to happen to make sure the things that took place last week actually show up in the data spine next year?

See you in the digital staffroom.