You are writing the next school improvement plan and want it to be used all year
A new planning cycle is starting, and the aim is a plan that is focused, owned and still in use in February.
The next improvement plan is due. There is an opportunity now to decide what the year is genuinely for, who owns each part of it, and how progress will be known before the summer. Whether the plan is still used after September is largely settled by how it is written in the next few weeks.
Presenting symptoms
- Last year’s plan is being reviewed and several actions are still marked as in progress.
- Priorities are arriving from several directions and the list is growing before drafting has begun.
- Last year’s success criteria cannot be evaluated, because nothing was measured along the way.
Possible causes
- The previous plan may have carried more priorities than a year could hold.
- It may have been written by a small group and read by everyone else.
- It may have set outcomes without lead measures, so progress could not be seen until it was too late to act.
- Predictable obstacles may not have been named, so the first one absorbed the plan.
It carried more than the year could hold.
Your most useful next step: Decide the number of priorities before deciding what they are, then give each sufficient depth, ownership and resource rather than adding another.
Lead behaviours
It was written by a few people and read by everyone else.
Your most useful next step: Agree the priorities with middle leaders before they are final, and give each one a named owner who helped word it.
Lead behaviours
It set outcomes, but nothing you could check in November.
Your most useful next step: Write one lead measure per priority that will move within a half term, and put the date you will look at it into the calendar now.
Lead behaviours
The first predictable obstacle absorbed it.
Your most useful next step: Before sign-off, run a premortem. Assume it is July and the plan failed, write down why, then change the plan rather than the premortem.
Lead behaviours
Core behaviours
A plan is either a set of goals the school has agreed or a set the leader has published. Only the first survives a difficult term, because only the first is defended by somebody other than its author.
The number of priorities is decided at the drafting stage and then lived with for a year. Every priority added here is one the school will later have to find the capacity to abandon.
A plan whose only measures arrive in August cannot be steered. A lead measure is what makes the plan checkable in November, while there is still time to change something.
The cheapest improvement available to any plan is made before it is signed off. Imagining its failure in advance surfaces the obstacle that would otherwise absorb the first term.
Ownership is settled during the writing, not during the launch. A priority whose owner helped word it gets defended, while one that was allocated gets reported on.
Secondary behaviours
Use this where narrowing the plan risks lowering expectations. Fewer priorities should create room for more demanding outcomes and stronger execution, not a smaller overall ambition.
Use this alongside the premortem. School improvement priorities commonly succeed in their own terms while creating a cost elsewhere, most often in workload.
Use this when setting the review points. Putting a date in the calendar for looking at each lead measure is part of writing the plan, not part of delivering it.
A useful first action
Before drafting anything, read last year’s plan and mark each action as done, abandoned or still in progress. Use what was actually completed, rather than what was originally promised, as evidence of how much this year’s plan can carry.
Suggested approach
- Evaluate last year’s plan honestly, marking what was completed, what was abandoned and what is still open.
- Decide how many priorities the year can hold before deciding what they are.
- Agree those priorities with the people who will deliver them, and give each a named owner who helped word it.
- Write one lead measure per priority that will move within a half term, and diarise the date you will look at it.
- Run a premortem before sign-off, and change the plan in response to what it surfaces.