This week I stood in my local park looking up at the sky. I'd made a pinhole camera from a Cheerios box but soon enough someone pressed a pair of colourful cardboard eclipse glasses into my hand and I got to see the real thing. Standing shoulder to shoulder with equally enraptured strangers, I gazed open-mouthed as the Sun's orangey crescent shrank, and the light went strange and grey.
Weird how something so wondrous and epic could be so quiet. And how you can be reminded of how tiny and inconsequential you are and yet, in the moment I felt so connected and alive!
And when it was finally all over, my kids and I walked home belting out 'Total eclipse of the heart' through the streets of Walthamstow.
A very fitting experience for August then! The park we were in was bleached blonde with crispy straw where the grass used to be. August is the month where we too get to bleach out our mind, crisp up our edges, slow the pace and let all the fuss of the year slowly fade in the sun.
Part of why I'm feeling so chipper is that I'm off on holiday next week. I trust you're also squeezing in some holiday this summer - whether that's leaving the country, stay-cationing, or just spending an afternoon doing nothing useful for once. Rest and reinvigoration shouldn't be luxury items.
Not that the ICB office has been quiet. Our team days this summer have been genuinely joyous. When you're mostly remote, like we are, office days are a welcome moment to talk through projects and get alignment. But I also love seeing what everyone's wearing, watching and cooking these days! Any team that can debate our qualification pathway and the most delicious viral rice paper recipes with equal passion is a team firing on all cylinders.
And ICB is indeed firing on all cylinders. Our half-year results were ahead of budget, and student registrations are up significantly on last year, which tells me that in a noisy, uncertain economy, more people than ever are choosing bookkeeping as a serious, credible, future-proof profession. How right they are.
That momentum is why we’re investing in the people who teach it. We are now working closely with our accredited training providers on a development programme, supporting them as we prepare together to launch our refreshed syllabus and exams in January. These are partnerships that in some cases span our entire 30-year history. We bring the standard, they bring the training, and together we are injecting energy and ambition into the profession at exactly the moment it needs both.
And here's a piece of news with rather poetic timing - on the very day the moon eclipsed the sun, the revised Level 3 Assistant Accountant apprenticeship standard went live, and ICB qualifications are now mandated within it. This sits alongside our mandated qualifications on the Level 2 Accounts or Finance Assistant standard, meaning apprentices on both can now build their apprenticeship around ICB qualifications, earning recognised professional credentials as they train, with ICB as their Ofqual-regulated end-point assessor. It is a real vote of confidence in the rigour of what we teach and assess, and it opens a workplace route into the profession for a whole new generation of bookkeepers. Employers and training providers who want to know more can find full details on our apprenticeships pages.
Next month brings the launch of our Future Skills campaign, and again the timing feels just right. The skills agenda seems to be having 'a moment'. The Milburn Review's solutions report lands this autumn, and the Maple Review has already called for a national Business Skills Guarantee, naming financial and entrepreneurial capability as the skills too many people never get the chance to learn. We agree, and we intend to be part of the answer. ICB Future Skills are built on concrete, measurable digital bookkeeping, AI and finance capability, and provide a blueprint for learning the human skills through the technical ones, because that’s how they’re used in real life. You learn communication by explaining the numbers. You learn judgement by applying them. The future belongs to bookkeepers who can deliver both the data and the insight.
So, enjoy the bleached-out days while they last. Rest up. Eat well (and remember to soak your rice paper properly). And come back in September ready, because there’s a lot to get excited about.
See you in one twelfth of an orbit.