Strategic Management for School Development

Leading Your School′s Improvement Strategy

Brian Fidler

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780761965275, 9780761965268
• eBook ISBN: 9781446237106
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

Visit our Website to see a sample chapter

www.PaulChapmanPublishing.co.uk

This practical book introduces strategic management for senior managers in schools. The author: shows how it can contribute to school development; explores the leadership of strategic school improvement; and presents a strategic planning model for schools. At each stage, he deals with practice and shows how this involves the organization of the whole process and the stages of analysis, choice and implementation.

Written at a very accessible and practical level, the book focuses on:

- how to generate ideas,

- communication and managing change,

- how to organize staff to work together on strategic planning.

Numerous activities are also included, designed to facilitate staff discussion of strategic analysis and strategic choice

This book is essential for head teachers, deputy heads, and local authority professionals.

1 Introduction

---

Background

---

In 1991 Geoff Bowles and I with the help of John Hart produced the Effective Local Management of Schools Workbook: Planning Your School’s Strategy as an aid to schools that wished to engage in longerterm thinking about their future. This was a companion to the book Effective Local Management of Schools (Fidler and Bowles, 1989) which contained theoretical ideas and case studies of the constituents of school based management as applied in schools in England and Wales following the 1988 Education Reform Act. The workbook contained our ideas on formulating and implementing strategy in schools and it also contained activities on a variety of school management processes. We intended that either individuals or groups of staff in schools could work on them to apply our general ideas to their particular school and its context. The present book is a development of that workbook. I have continued to work on strategy in schools and develop my ideas about how to incorporate strategic ideas into school planning.

My thinking has been expanded by my increased study of the literature on strategic planning in business organisations and by teaching a course on strategic and school development planning on the part-time MSc Managing School Improvement degree at the University of Reading. Succeeding student groups have helped me better understand the theoretical ideas and they have also worked on activities based on the workbook and have applied the ideas of strategic analysis to their schools. Since they are all senior staff in schools, my ideas have been ‘reality tested’ by their attempts to work out what strategy would mean and its practicality for their own schools.

The original workbook has gone out of print and there have been substantial changes to the school context in England so that the activities needed updating. This combined with my evolving understanding of the difficulties of formulating and implementing strategy suggest that a new book would be timely. This brings together a comprehensive presentation of the theory and additional and updated activities to help apply strategic thinking to school improvement.

This book is primarily intended for practitioners – those staff in schools with a responsibility for leading and managing their institutions – who need to understand and apply the principles of strategy but are under great time pressure in their work. Thus this book does not make use of extensive references and there are just a few sources that are suggested for additional reading. For those taking advanced courses I hope to produce a more theoretical book which details the researched base for these ideas.

The book is intended for those in schools where there is a context of a high degree of self-management including staffing and finance with some degree of curricular decision-making even if there is a national curriculum. It takes the situation in England as its basis, although where it takes a particular example from England this will be specified. This should help those in other countries to apply the ideas in their context and also, as the situation in England changes in the future, particular considerations which are time-bounded should be easier to recognise and adapt.

Reason for book

---

The importance of improvement and the need for a long-term approach

In many countries education is a high priority and there is great pressure for the school system to produce better results. The form of the pressure and its emphasis may vary from country to country but there are some common features. There are pressures to improve:

• student results
• participation rates
• inclusion and results for previously disadvantaged groups
• parental satisfaction with schooling
• employer satisfaction with the products of schooling
• cost-effectiveness of schooling.

Whatever the particular pressures nationally and locally, it will be for the staff of any particular school to ascertain the needs of that school and formulate a development plan suited to its needs. It is unlikely that any school would need to tackle all these issues with equal vigour and, even if it did, there would be a need to prioritise which of the issues to tackle first. There are important considerations about what to improve and how.

There are a number of reasons for taking a long-term approach including that:

• major change cannot be accomplished quickly
• some changes need extensive preparation before the time is right
• future needs will be different to current ones.

Although major change cannot be accomplished quickly and may need to be pursued over a number of years, there has to be a start. However, the start also has to be continued. Whilst it is important to get started it is also vital to press on through a sequence of stages which are expected to reach the final destination. Strategy both identifies the final destination and also a route map of how to get there.

---

You can't get there from here.

(Wilkins and Patterson 1985)

---

Some changes are not possible in one step. They may need to be accomplished in stages over a number of years. Some changes may not be possible unless conditions are right. This means that extensive preparations are required. This may also mean waiting until the time is right.

Another reason why improvement needs long-term planning is that the final destination needs to take account of current requirements, and also incorporate the best of current thinking about the future. The education of children who are in school now needs to take account of the world into which they will emerge from schooling some years in the future. Unless some thought is given to prospective requirements it is likely that children will be being prepared for the past rather than the future.

A cautionary tale

Whilst improvement may need long-term planning, decline can also operate over the longer term. Without an understanding of strategy the full significance of each step in a long-term decline may not be appreciated. Strategic thinking deals not only with long-term success but also with the implications of decline if action is not taken.

---

The steady state is very precarious:
organisations are actually either declining or improving.

---

This is an example of the decline of a secondary school. A secondary school recruited from a very mixed and large catchment area – semi-rural, suburban and inner urban. Much of the catchment area was some way from the school and there were children who lived nearer but were in the catchment area of a neighbourhood school at the centre of a council estate. The secondary school received more applications than there were places because the school appeared more attractive to a number from the inner urban area than their local school. The school expanded slowly. However, this and a generally complacent attitude in the school led to continuing poor examination results. There were also some examples of indiscipline and the public image of the school declined.

Some parents from the suburban area of private sector housing began to search for alternative schools. Other schools began to organise transport to attract children from the suburban area. Lack of public relations and recruitment efforts in the semi-rural area led to a movement of these children to other schools. The number of children entering the school was constant but the composition was slowly changing: fewer well-motivated children from the middle-class semi-rural and suburban areas, and more children from the council estate with less supportive parents. This had not been noticed as a multifaceted effect, particularly as numbers had remained constant. Only the lower reading scores of children entering the school raised the issue.

All the ingredients were now in place for a downward spiral to continue which incorporated several vicious circles where each action made the situation worse. Some parents, anticipating what might happen to their children if they attended the catchment area school, avoided the school. These tended to be middle-class supportive parents. The changing composition of students led to poor results despite efforts to improve. In fact the school in some senses was improving, it was maintaining results despite a less able entry which meant that its value added was rising. But the exam result figure appearing in the published league tables was not improving like those of other schools. This further reinforced a wish to avoid the school by ambitious parents. Declining numbers of students began to reduce the income of the school, and economies had to be made. Additional resources were no longer available to tackle the children’s lower reading scores at entry and curricular options had to be narrowed. More and more behavioural problems worsened the school’s image and things got worse because of the flight of the better behaved.

The major point I want to make is that any one of these changes could have been dismissed as insignificant, but cumulatively they posed a severe if not fatal challenge. Without a sense of strategy the effect would not have been spotted until it was too late. By the time the numbers had declined, the composition of the school had already changed, which meant that exam results were unlikely to improve for the next five years and it would take increasing efforts to stabilise them.

This illustrates the insidious nature of slow but inexorable change. Each year the situation is only a little worse and so is tolerated because there is no immediate threat. When this has gone on for some time though, the effect is large and threatening but is much more difficult to tackle. No one should doubt that this is a very prevalent effect.

The classic illustration of this, and I suspect it is only apocryphal so animal lovers need not worry, which catches the imagination is the following.

If you place a live frog in cold water and slowly heat it, you can continue until the water boils and the frog dies. However, if you drop a frog into boiling water it jumps out and saves its life.

Schools responsible for their own future and success

In addition to planning what improvement can be made to children’s education, there is also an organisational dimension to improvement strategy. Whatever intentions there are for what a school as an organisation can achieve, there is also a need to ensure its survival, continuation and success if it is to be able to carry out its intentions. However laudable the intentions, if a school struggles because it does not have the appropriate quality of staff or does not engender the confidence of local parents, its intentions may be unrealisable. A confident, thriving school can achieve what a struggling school cannot, however good its plans for the education of its students. Thought must be given to the future of the organisation as an organisation, in addition to the task it performs for its community.

In schools with a high degree of delegated powers there will be the greatest scope for individual decisionmaking but there will also be an attendant expectation that the school’s future will depend on the actions of the staff of the school. In this case the need for an understanding of strategy and the ability to put it into practice is obvious. However, I believe that where schools or other educational institutions have any degree of influence on their future, they also have a need to understand strategy. Whilst the scope for individual decision-making may be reduced, there is a heightened need to understand the policy intentions of those who will impose decision-making from above. Where the scope for school-level decision-making is smaller, there is a need to be clear about and to exploit what opportunities are offered.

Need to attract students and public support

In English schools there is a need to attract students because the funding of a school is directly dependent on the number of children. The imposition of a funding scheme which attaches a sum of money to each child, which is paid to ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the author and acknowledgements
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Strategy
• 3. Leadership and strategy
• 4. Working together and involvement
• 5. Managing school improvement
• 6. A strategic planning model for schools
• 7. Strategic analysis: where are we now and what might the future hold?
• 8. Vision and strategic choice
• 9. Implementation and monitoring
• 10. Conclusion
• Activities
• References
• Further Reading
• Index