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VIEWS & OPINION Time to get planning
Comment by MILENKA STEVENS, content editor at The Key
As we approach the end of the academic year, it's like that much of your energy is going into planning for the year - and years - ahead. This will be a collective focus for your leadership team, alongside myriad other things happening throughout the summer term, so where do you start and how can you keep this work on track?
Tandem plans Your strategic plan and school development plan (SDP) - sometimes referred to as a school improvement plan (SIP) - should work alongside one another to help you plan and support whole-school improvement. However, when creating or reviewing these plans, make sure you keep in mind the key differences between the two:
• Your strategic plan should cover your broad, long-term objectives for the whole school. It will be driven by your school's mission and usually spans a five-year period • Your SDP will help you narrow down your focus for shorter time- frames. This typically spans one to three years
Your governors will be involved to some extent in both plans,
focusing on high-level objective-setting, but it’s up to you as school leaders to implement them. This is because you’re on site every day and are closer to the practicalities involved in implementing them on a day-to-day basis. You’ll have that detailed view of school life that your governors don't always have the time or indeed the opportunity to see.
Mission: possible When developing your strategic plan, remember to focus on your school’s vision: think about what you want to achieve over the next five years, align this with your school’s vision or mission statement, and set broad objectives for your whole school. You’ll want to start by identifying your school’s long-term priorities,
and then set objectives for each priority. Perhaps you want to further raise the quality of teaching and/or attainment across the school. Or maybe you’ve thought about working in partnership with other schools. Your governors should be working with you to set high-level
objectives. Your board's core function is strategic leadership, so governors will be interested in helping you set those broad objectives, rather than looking at how you should achieve them.
Be target focused Once you’ve got your strategic plan, your SDP (or SIP) will set out how you plan to achieve it. Your SDP should be medium-term (or sometimes more short-term) and focus on specific targets. Typically, your SDP will be set over two or three years. Targets that
will help to achieve your strategic plan might include raising attainment in a particular subject, or increasing attendance levels. Your SDP might also include measurable targets based on your specific objectives - for example, you might set a target for GCSE results to fit with your objective of raising attainment in English. Your SDP will also need to include actions, with clear information about who will be responsible for each action, and a completion date. As your SDP offers a closer look at how you'll tackle school
improvement, it’s likely to include more detailed operational information. So, just as your governors won’t focus on how you achieve the broad objectives in your strategic plan, they might also take a step back with some of the content of your SDP. Make sure you think about how to evaluate and monitor each aspect of your SDP, too.
22
www.education-today.co.uk Digitalisation and schools:
momentum continues Comment by LOUISE PINK, Customer Success MAT Manager, Education Software Solutions (ESS)
In April 2022, rules were changed so that schools are no longer required to collect Covid-19 absence data. Though the move will have been well intentioned – perhaps a reflection of the administrative pressure the ‘collection burden’ is placing on teachers, leaders and support staff – it has tapped into a broader debate about the importance of absence data. After all, Covid-19 has not gone away. Concerns remain about
transmission on the part of pupils, parents and teachers alike. What’s more, the collection and analysis of absence data has always been incredibly important to schools: Covid-19 didn’t introduce entirely new considerations, it essentially heightened and digitised them. Put simply, mapping teacher absences onto pupil performance
and wellbeing has always been a critical means of ensuring that children do not miss out because of prolonged or regular staff absences. This is particularly true amongst primary school pupils, who typically form an especially strong bond with their teacher and subsequently struggle if permanent, regular cover cannot be found. Inevitably, given the need to self-isolate and potentially miss weeks of teaching, Covid-19 has only accentuated such concerns. But where such efforts might once have been carried out
manually, the arrival of Covid-19 in the UK forced the process to become digital - and to the fore came management information systems (MIS). They allowed schools to continue to track the effect of absence on remote pupils’ progress whilst also allowing vital safeguarding to continue. Multi-academy trusts, meanwhile, benefitted immensely from access to the data of multiple schools. Against such a backdrop, even though the collection of Covid-19
absence data is no longer mandated, it seems likely schools will continue to collect and analyse such information through digital systems. Technological solutions, to put it another way, have proved their ongoing worth: long-established practices were further honed during the pandemic and will probably persist after. But it’s not just Covid-19 that has driven the digitalisation of
schools. Rather, it is clear that we now live in a digital world. The last few years have seen such a rapid growth in technology – whether that be ever-evolving smartphones or audio assistants – that there are now more bytes of data on the internet than stars in the observable universe. It is perhaps inevitable, then, that schools will embrace data. Then there is the rise of what might be called ‘soft data’: little
details – famed water cooler conversations, for instance – that can be tracked via digital platforms and used to shape school policy. A recognition that afternoons preceded by carbohydrate-heavy lunches tend to be a bit lethargic can be uncovered by MIS platforms and menus changed, for instance. Of course, in a GDPR world, the collection and use of data is not
without risk. No school will adopt a cavalier approach to its use of children’s data, but for those concerned about potential legal issues, it can be helpful to stick to the principle of threes – namely never freely give out name, age or address. Unsolicited phone calls asking for data, even when the person at the other end says they are from a recognised partner agency regularly involved with the school, should never see information freely volunteered. Data is only going to become more important to schools, even as
Covid-19 retreats further. And with the right safeguards, there is no reason why schools can’t utilise this information effectively. However, it is essential that schools are not just data rich but information rich too. Having the data is essential but it is the ‘so what’ of what school leaders determine from their strategic analysis of it that will drive improvement.
June 2022
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