More of everything else: what the Enrichment Framework means for primary schools, and how to deliver it without more screens or more staff goodwill
The DfE published its Enrichment Framework on 15 June 2026. It sets out five categories of enrichment, eight benchmarks, and from September Ofsted will look at how your school's offer measures up as part of its personal development judgement.
Most primary schools already do enrichment. The DfE's own figures put it at near-universal. So the framework is not asking you to start from nothing. It is asking something harder: can you show that your offer is purposeful, varied, inclusive across all five categories, and improving over time, without leaning even more heavily on staff who already run clubs in their own time and without putting children back in front of more screens.
That is the gap this guide is about.
What the framework actually says
The guidance is non-statutory. There is no such thing as being "Enrichment Framework compliant", and Ofsted has been clear it will not inspect against the benchmarks as a pass-or-fail test this September.
What inspectors will do is consider whether your enrichment is purposeful and varied, having regard to the framework, as part of personal development.
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The five categories are:
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Civic engagement: volunteering, debating, school democracy, community engagement
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Arts and culture: music, art, dance, theatre, museum and gallery experiences
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Nature, outdoors and adventure: time outdoors, sustainability, gardening, residentials
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Sport and physical activity
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Wider life and future skills: digital literacy, STEM, cooking, managing money, enterprise
The eight benchmarks ask you to build a strategically aligned offer, make it broad and varied across all five categories, make it inclusive, celebrate participation, work with external partners where useful, and keep improving it.
That last point matters most. Benchmark eight asks for a continually improving offer, and the DfE explicitly suggests schools use their management information systems to track participation and outcomes over time. In other words: it is not enough to run the activities. You are expected to be able to show who took part, across which categories, and to what effect.
Why this is harder than it looks for primary schools
Two pressures sit underneath the framework, and the sector raised both within days of publication.
The first is workload. School leaders' unions pointed out that enrichment is overwhelmingly delivered on goodwill. More than a third of teachers who run clubs do so outside directed time and without pay. A framework that widens the expected offer, without funding that reliably reaches schools, risks asking those same staff to do more. If your plan for September is "ask teachers to run another club", you are building on the most fragile resource you have.
The second is breadth. Covering all five categories well is genuinely difficult in a primary setting. Sport and the outdoors tend to be well served. Arts and culture, civic engagement, and wider life skills are where the gaps usually sit, and they are the categories that are hardest to staff and hardest to evidence.
So the practical question for most primary leaders is not "do we do enrichment?" It is "how do we fill the thin categories, prove it, and not break our staff in the process?"
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The screen-free point the minister made
When the DfE announced its enrichment ambassadors, schools minister Georgia Gould framed the whole programme around one idea: making sure there is a better option waiting for children outside of their screens. Children, she said, do not just need less screen time. They need more of everything else: sport, creativity, the outdoors, time with friends in the real world.
That is the right test for any enrichment you add this year. Does it give children more of everything else, or does it quietly add more screen time under a different label? A lot of what gets sold to schools as enrichment is a device, an app, and a login. It counts on a spreadsheet. It does not count for much in a child's day.
How immersive audio fits
This is where we have a point of view, because it is what now>press>play does.
now>press>play delivers immersive audio learning Experiences. Children put on headphones, the classroom becomes a rainforest, a Roman fort, a polar expedition, and they move, decide, and respond inside the story. There is no screen. The teacher does not need to be a subject specialist, and they do not need to give up another lunchtime to run it. You press play. Against this framework, now>press>play does useful work in exactly the categories primary schools find hardest:
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Arts and culture, through drama, story, music and movement built into every Experience
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Civic engagement and wider life skills, through Experiences that put children inside real decisions about community, fairness, health and the wider world
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Inclusion, because an audio Experience meets children who struggle with text or screens on equal terms, which speaks directly to the benchmark on making enrichment inclusive
And because it runs through your existing timetable rather than depending on after-school goodwill, it adds to your offer without adding to the pile of unpaid clubs.
We are not claiming it covers all five categories. Nothing does. We are saying it is a fast, screen-free way to strengthen the three categories most primary schools are thinnest on, and to do it on day one of term rather than building slowly across the year.
What to do before September
You have thinking time before Ofsted starts looking.
A sensible order:
Map what you already run against the five categories. You will probably find sport and outdoors are strong and at least one of arts, civic, or life skills is thin.
Decide how you will evidence participation. The framework expects it, and your MIS can carry it if you set it up now rather than in October.
Fill the thin categories with provisions that do not depend on staff goodwill or additional screen time.
Write it down as a simple offer you can talk an inspector through. Not a compliance document. A clear story about personal development.
See where your gaps are
We have built a free Enrichment Framework self-audit for primary leaders. It takes about ten minutes, maps your current offer against the eight benchmarks and the five categories, and shows you where the gaps are before September does.
If filling those gaps screen-free is where you land, that is the conversation we are here for.