Citation
Fishbourne, D. (2000), "Strategic Direction and Development of the School", International Journal of Educational Management, Vol. 14 No. 1, pp. 45-45. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijem.2000.14.1.45.1
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
“The thicker the plan the less it affects classroom practice!” As a practitioner in the field, I could not agree more with Davies and Ellison’s opening statement. Having spent much of the 1990s reading about and creating ever more complex development plans, it is a pleasure to see the evolution of this beast into something much more manageable, more useful and better suited to schools approaching the twenty‐first century.
Davies and Ellison break the process down into a three stage, interlinked model: Futures Perspective; Strategic Intent/Strategic Planning; Operational Target Setting. In the long term, futures thinking involves school leaders in standing back from the current management issues and analysing global and national trends which are likely to have an impact on education over the next ten to 15 years. Instead of being the victims of external change, schools can then work towards setting their own agenda, to a certain degree, despite a turbulent environment.
In the medium term, strategic planning is a vehicle which we would all recognise, in some form or another. As this vehicle is only suitable for the more predictable and controllable elements of the planning processed, however, the authors introduce, alongside this, the concept of strategic intent, which they describe as “a process of coping with turbulence by understanding broad, major events and binding people to them by establishing them as core purposes of the organisation”.
Finally, in the short term, they suggest that operational target setting should cover four areas: whole school; areas (e.g. departments); individual staff targets and plans; individual pupil targets and action plans.
This easily read book also includes clear examples of all the processes, integrated into a cohesive framework, proformas for you to try out yourself and case studies of schools which have done just that (both primary and secondary).
I would recommend it without hesitation as a very useful tool for those thinking of reviewing the strategic processes undertaken in their schools.